


the lost art of keeping a secret

by tactfulGnostalgic



Series: the family brooklyn [2]
Category: Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Good Father Jefferson Davis, Identity Reveal, Post-Canon, Stand Alone, may parker is a badass txt it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-22 09:20:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17660030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tactfulGnostalgic/pseuds/tactfulGnostalgic
Summary: They say that done properly, parenting is a heroic act.(Or: Jefferson finds out. It doesn't go well, until it does.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> “The irony of having teenagers, of course, is that at the exact moment they need to know the things that you alone can tell them, they have reached a moment in their lives when you, as their parent, are the only person they cannot get this information from.”  
>  _—Jennifer Finney Boylan_

Contrary to what his son might believe, Jefferson Davis is a very good detective.

He's one of the top officers in his department, in fact. He's received multiple commendations for his work. Back when he was a rookie, he picked up the nickname "Psych," because he could take one look at a crime scene and see a dozen details no one else had even thought to look for. Call it a natural instinct or call it the aftermath of an adolescence spent seeing things from the other side of the law, but his case record is almost spotless. And if he's known for being a little bit of a wet blanket, well, there are worse things to be known for than sticking to the rules. 

Here's the thing that people don't tend to get, either: in a police investigation, refusing to play by the rules can screw everybody over. There's no place for renegades and mavericks on the squad; that kind of thing is for rookies and people who watch too much daytime TV. There are  _rules_ and _procedures_ and  _paperwork_ and _yes,_ it's a pain in the ass to sit around waiting for a warrant while Spider-Man gets to do backflips off skyscrapers, but that's the price you pay for not getting  _sued_. Things have to be done the right way, or one smart lawyer can send the whole thing toppling down. Ever wonder why supervillains keep getting out of jail, even after Spider-Man beats them time and again? Jefferson doesn't. Jefferson knows perfectly well why the Vulture's never spent more than three months at a time behind bars, and it's got nothing to do with prison security.

See, sweeping in on a spiderweb and beating up bad guys may earn you publicity points, but it sure as hell doesn't constitute lawful arrest. The reason the police don't tend to work well with Spider-Man is two parts incompatible methods to one part good old-fashioned resentment. There isn't a person on the force who wouldn't give their own left arm to have the freedom that Spider-Man does. Who doesn't dream about solving the world's problems with a couple well-placed blows and a punchy catchphrase? But that's not how the rule of law works. If you don't follow protocol when pursuing leads, you can't use the evidence in court. If an officer can't demonstrate probable cause, the arrest doesn't count. If you so much as  _stutter_ while reading someone's Miranda Rights, you have to start the whole thing over. That's how important it is to do things by the book, in Jefferson's line of work.

And so yes, he's a stickler for rules, and no, that's never won him any friends. But that doesn't mean he's unobservant. He just likes to be sure of something before he leaps to making accusations, that's all. Unfounded assumptions, in his experience, are dangerous things.

So when Miles starts acting funny, it takes Jefferson all of about five minutes to notice.

To be fair, Miles is also his son, and he would know something was wrong even if they were on opposite sides of the earth. He knows Miles' tells better than he knows his own, and on top of that, the boy inherited his father's ability to lie. (That is to say, he can't. At all.)

"Ace bandages and baby powder?" He stares at the two items at the bottom of the grocery list, scrawled in Miles' neat hand. "What does he need with those?"

Rio holds up a pear to the light, examining it for brown spots. They invariably spend most of their trips to the supermarket in the produce aisle, waiting for her to pass judgment on the quality of each and every item she loads into their cart. Jefferson has given up trying to hurry the process. He knows better than to argue with Rio when it comes to her ingredients. "Maybe it's for a school project," she suggests.

"What kind of project needs ace bandages and baby powder?"

"Health, maybe?" She puts back one pear but keeps the other, settling it carefully into the cart. "They had us do all kinds of crazy things in health. You remember the CPR dummy?"

"I had  _nightmares_ about the CPR dummy."

"It's the eyes, right? They're soulless."

"Felt like I was trying to resuscitate a demon." He holds out a yam to her. "Ripe?"

She takes it and turns it over in her hands, pressing experimentally on the skin to test its give, before shaking her head and handing it back. He passes her another. "It could be for his art," she offers.

"Baby powder?"

"Maybe it's avante-garde."

"Even Banksy doesn't use baby powder."

She shrugs. "It's useful to have around," she says. "It helps with chafing. And bandages are useful for all kinds of things." 

Something occurs to him. He pauses in bagging their vegetables, and frowns. "He'd tell us if he was injured, right?"

Rio stops, too. Her fingers still to a halt on the yam, and she catches her lip between her teeth in the way she does when she's thinking hard about something. "Of course he would," she says, but it's hesitant. "He wouldn't lie to us."

Jefferson nods, and passes her another yam, but can't help but focus more on the second part than the first; Miles is an honest kid, but to a teenager, the gulf between  _lying_ and  _not telling_  is a mile wide.

"Even if he wouldn't . . ." He doesn't know how to say this. He rubs his neck. "Even if he wouldn't tell me, I mean — he'd tell you, right?"

Rio stops. She sets the yams down. She turns to him, hands on her hips in a way he just knows means he's about to either apologize or get chewed out in the middle of the produce aisle, and lifts one eyebrow. "Jefferson," she says slowly, "why do you think would he tell me and not you?"

"Well, you know." He stares determinedly at a pile of apples over her left shoulder. Once he makes eye contact, he's already lost.

"No, tell me."

"It's just . . . you know how it is."

"I really think I don't."

"I mean, I'm his dad, and . . ."

"And what do you think that means?"

"Just that he and I have a different relationship, and—"

"Different how?"

He should have known better than this, he thinks distantly, still staring balefully at the apple pile. He really should have known better. He's been married to her for eighteen years, he should have known better than to think she'd let it go. 

"You're a nurse," he says abruptly, changing tac. "If he was hurt, he'd probably go to you first. That's all." Then he smiles winningly, doing his very best to appear as though that was all he meant.

Rio doesn't buy it for a second, and the arch of her eyebrow tells him so. But she accepts this de-escalation strategy for what it is, and lets it slide with a quiet  _humph_ under her breath. "You're his father," she says. "He trusts you, you know."

"I know," he lies.

"Even if he doesn't say it."

"I know."

"I mean, he loves you. He admires you. He wants to be like you. It's hard to open up to someone you see that way."

"Rio," he cuts her off, gently, but firmly. He sends a meaningful glance around the supermarket, feeling warm. "Here?"

She purses her lips and concedes, settling the yams she has deemed suitable in the cart. "You should talk to him about it," she insists, as a parting shot. "It's not good to let these things simmer."

"I will. Once he's ready."

"Which means once  _you're_ ready," she mutters, and he laughs it off. Then they leave the produce aisle to go hunt down some baby powder and ace bandages.

She's right, of course. In the eighteen years he's been married to her, he's never known her not to be. That doesn't make her advice any easier to take.

 

* * *

 

His attempts to ask Miles about the unorthodox grocery requests are met with poorly executed deflections and obvious excuses. Whatever reason Miles has for wanting them, he apparently really, really doesn't want his father to know about it, and it's enough to make Jefferson uneasy. Not because he suspects Miles is doing anything untoward, since the kid doesn't have a bad bone in his body, and he's too bad at cover stories to have kept something like that a secret for this long. But because Jefferson is a cop, he's heard too many horror stories not to get on edge when he knows his son is lying to him.

And it wouldn't be a problem, except it's not the only thing that's wrong. Miles is staying over at friends' houses more often, even though he's spending most of the week away from home at Visions. Miles is skipping meals. Miles is rushing through dinners and then running off to his room to "do homework" for hours on end. Miles has stopped throwing up stickers, or at least where Jefferson can find them. As far as he can tell, Miles hasn't painted since Aaron's mural. 

Last week, Jefferson patted Miles on the back, and Miles _winced_.

He knows this pattern of behavior. He's explained this very pattern of behavior to dozens, maybe hundreds of distraught parents, as their kid — or the remains of them — waited in a different room. It's a hauntingly familiar refrain that echoes through his mind as he stands outside Miles' bedroom door, working up the courage to knock:  _They were acting funny for a few weeks before . . . Didn't talk to me about it, I thought it was just a phase . . . You know how teenagers are . . . Never would have suspected . . . I wouldn't have left them alone if I thought . . ._

He'd always been sympathetic but vaguely scornful of those parents, the ones who let their kids run around getting into all kinds of trouble and then turned around and were shocked when something bad happened to them; after enough time, they all sounded alike.  _What did you expect to happen?_ he was always tempted to demand, when those selfsame kids wound up shooting up or getting shot or both, and the parents sat there gaping at him as he explained why he'd called them in. _Haven't you heard about the warning signs?_   _Did you even wonder why they were behaving differently? Did you not notice when your own child started acting like a stranger?_

_Didn't you care enough to ask?_

He used to think about Aaron a lot, after dealing with those parents. Used to think about their folks, and what might have happened if somebody had thought to ask Aaron, if someone had cared enough to ask Aaron, back when there was still enough time. He used to open his phone and stare at Aaron's contact, thumb hovering over the call button, wondering if there still might be time enough.

Jefferson thinks that one of the worst things about life is never knowing how much time you have left until there's none.

Nowadays, though, he thinks about Miles. And he understands. He knows how it feels to see the signs and not know what to do with them, even when logically, he knows what it probably means. It feels like a snake is worming its way through his gut, stalling his hand as he lifts it to knock, making him so nauseous he wants to throw up. It feels like wanting to know why, but being terrified of the answer, and still more terrified of the idea that even if he asked, Miles wouldn't tell him. It feels like suspecting that he's losing his son, and not knowing why or how to stop it.

He takes a deep breath, focuses on the mental image of Aaron's face, and raises his fist to knock.

The door swings open before he can, and Miles almost careens headlong into him.

"Whoa!"

"Oh — hey, Dad," he says, stumbling to a halt. "Uh, what's up?"

He's grown so  _tall,_ Jefferson notices, as he takes a moment to survey him. He's almost as tall as Rio. When did that happen? Had he noticed that before?

"Just wanted to talk," he says, forcing himself to be light, sticking his hands in his pockets. "You got a minute?"

"Um. I was kind of about to head over to Ganke's, actually—"

"Oh good, you do," Jefferson says cheerfully, and gestures to Miles' desk chair. "May I?"

Miles' shoulders slump. "Yeah," he mumbles, and waves one apathetic hand to the seat. He trudges over to the bed and tosses himself down on it, the picture of disaffected youth, and for a second, Jefferson is so forcefully reminded of Aaron that it hurts. He has to take a moment to compose himself.

"So," he says. He leans over on his knees and laces his fingers, trying to appear casual, relatable. Should he have sat backwards on the chair? He's seen teens do that, sometimes, on TV. He always thought it looked silly, but maybe it would have lightened the mood. Or would it have been lame if he tried? "School going well?"

"Yeah," Miles says, folding his arms. Not good. His posture is still closed-off, distant. He wants to be somewhere else, and his mind's clearly there instead of here.

"What are you learning about?"

Miles counts the subjects off on his fingers. "Trig functions in math, Keats in English, the Byzantine Empire in history, atomic bonds in science, muscular structure in health, impressionism in art, and we've been doing dodgeball in gym."

"Which one's your favorite subject?"

A tiny smirk twists the edge of Miles' mouth. "Take a guess."

"Oh, math. It's math, right? I know how much you love math."

The smirk splits into a grin, and Miles looks away, huffing a laugh under his breath. Jefferson counts it as a victory. "Yeah, you got me pegged," he says.

"You know, I was something of a history buff when I was in school." Jefferson leans his arm over the back of the chair.  _Lead in by sharing something about yourself, make him feel at ease, make him feel comfortable. Make sure he doesn't feel like you're here to accuse. This is a conversation, not an interrogation._  "I was all about World War I. I bought all of those trivia books, you know, the giant box sets with the separate appendices?" He holds up his hands to demonstrate the books' ample girth. "I was crazy for it."

"Huh," says Miles, vaguely interested. "Really?"

"Oh, yeah. For example, ask me who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand."

Miles gives him a flat look. Jefferson persists, "Come on, ask me."

"Who killed the Archduke Franz Ferdina—"

"Gavilo Princip. And here's the funny part: he only got the chance because Ferdinand's driver accidentally took Ferdinand's motorcade in the wrong direction, and stopped the car to turn around right where Princip was standing. If the driver had taken the correct route, Princip would have missed his chance."

"That's really cool, Dad," Miles says tonelessly.

"Spent a lot of time reading those books. Man, that takes me back. But enough about your old man, huh?" Jefferson drums his fingers on his knee. "How's your, uh, how's your art been lately?"

Miles perks up, if only slightly. "It's good," he says. "I've been watching these videos about how to get crisper lines with spray paint. It's been interesting."

"Good, good. You thrown it up anywhere lately?"

It's the wrong thing to say, for some reason, and Jefferson regrets it as soon as it's out of his mouth. Miles shuts down. "No," he says swiftly, a bit sullen. "I haven't broken our deal, Dad, I remember."

"No, that's not what I—"

"If you found something, it's probably from a while ago, I'll go take it down as soon I can—"  

"I'm not concerned about that," he interrupts. "I know you keep your word. I was just wondering if you'd done anything new. That's all."

"Not really," Miles says, and God, but it pains Jefferson, the naked mistrust in his voice. "It's hard when I can't do anything in the normal spots."

"The normal illegal spots, you mean?"

He knew that was the wrong move before he said it, really. It just slipped out instinctively. He didn't mean it in the way Miles takes it — as a reprimand for something that Miles didn't even do. Miles rolls his eyes. "Yeah, those," he says, flat with an edge of mockery.

"I'll find you some more places to put up your art," Jefferson promises, leaning forward. "Places with a lot of foot traffic, even better than the old spots. There's a bunch of old buildings by the precinct, I bet the owners would love to have some color to spruce up the brick."

"Yeah?" Miles finally meets his eyes. 

"Oh, absolutely. Graffiti is big nowadays. You know, having a Banksy actually increases your property value."

"Banksy is a hack, Dad."

"Okay, well, be that as it may, the principle applies. Just because I don't want you committing vandalism doesn't mean I want you to stop making art. You're, uh . . ." He doesn't know why this is so hard. His dad never made it look this hard. "You're really good."

Miles smiles a little, small and bright and soft. "Thanks."

"I mean it." Jefferson parses out what he's about to say next carefully, plotting each word with the delicacy that he uses while dealing with witnesses. "I hope that's not the reason you've been kind of . . . off your game, lately."

"Off my game?" Miles face scrunches up. "Dad, I'm making straight A's, I don't think it's fair to—"

"Not your grades," he clarifies, holding up his hands. "Those are fine. It just seems to me like . . ."

"Like what?"

"Well, from what I've seen, and the way you've been lately, I . . ."

"What are you talking about?"

He's so much like his mother. "You seem off, lately," Jefferson manages. "Like you're distracted. Is something . . . bothering you?"

It's not as direct as what he meant to say, but it's something, so he'll take it. Miles recoils into himself, folding his arms tightly and squaring his jaw. "No," he says. "Everything's fine. I like school, I'm getting good grades, I have friends."

"You seem to always be running off somewhere."

"I'm just busy."

"You never used to be this busy."

"They work us hard at Visions." Miles' expression hardens. "You were the one who wanted me to push myself, right?"

"Of course! Of course I do, I just—"

"So what do you want me to do?"

"Nothing," he bites out, and then, "or— something, I don't know. Miles — you're happy, right?"

It comes out desperate, to Jefferson's ear. Desperate and panicked, the last resort of someone who doesn't know what else to say.

Miles stares at him for a moment, and then gives a startled kind of laugh. "Yeah," he says simply. "Of course I am."

The thing is, Jefferson knows when his son is lying. And that wasn't a lie.

Which doesn't make sense, because if all those kids who end up at the station have one thing in common, it's that they're never happy. Acting up is a cry for attention. It delivers momentary shots of adrenaline and endorphins, a quick buzz, but ultimately no long-term satisfaction. Happy kids don't end up in Jefferson's precinct. Which makes Miles' answer all the more confusing, because something is definitely, absolutely up with Miles. It's just not making him unhappy, apparently.

And what kind of kid is  _happy_ about having a lot of homework, anyway?

"All right," he says, suspicious.

"I  _am."_ Miles has a twinkle in his eye. Jefferson knows that twinkle. It's the one that Rio sports whenever she's silently laughing at him.

"You can tell me if you're not."

"I know. But I am."

"Are you certain?"

"I'm pretty sure I'd know," he chuckles, and Jefferson knows when he's hit a dead end in an investigation. Sighing, he stands up, and Miles springs up behind him, practically vibrating with the desire to be somewhere else. Jefferson can sympathize.

"Well, tell me if that changes," he says.

"Okay."

"And if you need anything. There's no shame in asking for help, now and then."

"Gotcha," Miles chirps, hovering in the doorway.

"And if anything starts to give you trouble, you let me know, all right? Or Mom?"

"Totally," he agrees, not listening to a word Jefferson is saying.

Jefferson sighs. "Have fun at your friend's house," he says, and Miles shoots off like a rocket down the hallway.

"Okay Dad I will see you later love you bye!"

"Love you, too," Jefferson calls. He's cut off mid-sentence by Miles swinging the door shut behind him.

 

* * *

 

"I'm just not sure what you're asking me, exactly, Mr. Davis. You're aware that your son's academic performance has been exemplary."

"No, of course I know that. I wouldn't expect anything less. I'm more worried about his . . . general behavior."

"Are you concerned about his disciplinary record?"

"No! No, that's not really—"

"Has Miles' experience at Visions Academy been dissatisfactory in some way?"

"Not exactly."

"Then forgive me for my directness, sir, but what _exactly_ seems to be the problem?"

Jefferson sends a furtive glance over his shoulder, checking that the kitchen door is closed, and then tightens his grip on the receiver. "Listen," he says, "Does Miles seem . . . happy? To you?"

There's a beat of silence over the line, occupied only by a dull crackle of static. "No," the principal says, after a moment. "No, Mr. Davis. I can't claim to have much interaction with him on a day-to-day basis, but from what I've seen, Miles' behavior is not that of an unhappy person."

"Not distracted, or quiet, or . . . ?"

The principal sighs. "I think I know what this is about," she says.

"You do?"

"Yes." He barely has time to get his hopes up before she continues, "You're not the first parent to make this call, although I admit it's a bit surprising to hear from you, given your enthusiasm for the academy the last time we spoke. Hard as it is to accept, many children — Miles included — _are_ mature enough to handle the challenges of living on their own. By every indication, Miles' newfound independence is being put to good use in his studies, and his teachers are more than willing to testify as such on his behalf."

"That's not what I meant."

"No?" She pauses. "Then is it about Miles that concerns you?" While he grapples with his lack of an answer, she adds, "It's always a bit scary, watching them leave the nest."

"I guess so," he says, defeated.

"Believe me, I understand. I have two of my own." A fond lilt edges the principal's voice. "Nineteen and twenty-two, respectively. One just left for college in California, and the other is finishing up her bachelors in Michigan. Letting them go was the hardest thing I ever did, and the best."

"Right," he says numbly. This would be all well and good, except it isn't the problem he has. He was more than comfortable trusting Miles to take care of himself; he'd been the one who pushed for the school change.  _You've got to let him go, sometime, Rio,_ he'd said, when she balked at the idea of having him away five nights a week.  _He can't stay here forever. A little freedom, under the right circumstances, is just the right thing to help them grow._

"But I understand your caution, sir, of course I do. And if you'd like someone to sit down and have a talk about it with Miles, I'm happy to have that arranged."

"You are?" He's hopeful again. Maybe there's some teacher Miles trusts enough to tell about whatever's going on; any qualified adult is better than nothing. "Is there someone you think could get through to him?"

"Oh, absolutely. I'll ask around with his teachers and see if anyone shares your concerns." Her tone is almost insultingly indulgent, and his heart drops. Nobody's going to talk to Miles. He knows when he's being fed a script, and the principal is exuding the kindly boredom of someone who has this conversation three times a week. "If they do, we'll speak to Miles. If not, I'll let you know. One way or another, we'll make sure your son is taken care of."

"Thank you," he says tiredly. "I appreciate it."

"Of course. Will that be all?"

The kitchen door opens. Jefferson puts his hand over the receiver as Rio ducks her head in, her hair pulled back, face bare of makeup, the trademark mint green of scrubs peering out from under her jacket collar.

"Jeff?"

"One second," he calls, and then takes his hand off the mouthpiece. "Yes. That'll be all. Thanks for your time."

"You're very welcome. Thank you for calling, Mr. Davis. Have a nice night."

The line goes dead, and he hangs up the receiver.

 

* * *

 

Work is the same as ever, which is to say it's never the same. A rash of burglaries on the east side is occupying most people's time. Elliott has decided to put serious effort into trying to nail the Kingpin down for felony tax evasion, even though Jefferson's told him a thousand times it's a pipe dream. Minkowski and Jacobi are still working the heroin case with some people from the 99, and as soon as Jefferson clocks in, someone calls into the precinct to report an armed robbery. He barely has time to sip his coffee before he's whisked off to Brownsville to scope out the crime scene. Sally snags him a croissant from the break room on the way out and takes the wheel so he can eat in the car, because she's his favorite and also objectively one of the best people in the building.

". . . really unconscionable," she's saying, as they wait at a standstill in morning traffic. "I mean, what is it about 'obstruction of justice' that these kids don't get? I wasn't asking him for his social security number or anything, I just wanted him to point me in the direction the guy went. It's like they get a kick out of spitting in the face of authority."

"You know they do," he says, trying to figure out how to best approach eating a croissant without getting crumbs all over the squad car.

"I mean, well. Yeah. I guess. It's still a real pain in the ass, though, you know?"

"Absolutely."

"Like, what do I have to do to get it through to these kids that I'm trying to look out for them? You know? They're gonna thank me for keeping them out of trouble in ten, twenty years."

"If they live that long," he says grimly.

"Jesus, Jeff."

"Sorry. Too dark?"

"Little bit," Sally says frankly. The light changes, and they start to crawl forward. "I don't know. It's just hard to watch them throw their lives away and know I can't do anything about it. It reminds me too much of Tommy."

"Mm."

"I mean, _you've_ got a teenager. What would you do if he got pulled into something like that?"

"Miles wouldn't," he says automatically.

"Well, I know that. But I'm just saying, for the sake of the argument."

"I'd straighten him out," he says, but even as he says it, he's looking out the window. A group of teenagers in hoodies wander down the street, laughing and bouncing off of one another. There's a visceral spike of unease in his belly when he thinks about Miles being one of those kids, collar up, face hidden, running around in dubious parts of town. It's too easy to imagine. He hates that it's so easy for him to imagine it.

"Easier said than done," Sally laughs. "The other day I tried to talk to Tommy about his grades, and he basically jumped out the window."

He makes a sympathetic sound. She shakes her head, still chuckling. "Not a problem for you and Rio, I take it," she says.

"We got lucky with Miles," he says, still running on autopilot. "He knows the value of hard work."

"You're telling me. Tommy came home relieved the day Miles told him he was leaving. Said he'd been fucking up the grade curve for years."

Jefferson snorts. "Sounds like an excuse to me."

"Oh, you think I don't know that? But all the same." She peers around the corner before making a left turn onto a narrow street full of decomposing tenement buildings, stacked high like slices of ribbed fruitcake. Her expression turns pensive. "Sometimes I wish the apple fell a little farther from the old tree."

Her regret turns the air thick and heavy. He coughs, and tries to lighten the mood. "Speak for yourself," he says. "I didn't have much at all in common with Miles, as a kid."

"No?"

"Not really. Me and Aaron," he begins, fondly, and then falters. "We were probably more like that kid you came across."

"You're kidding."

"I'm not. I probably still have a few old tags still lying around Glendale." 

Sally whistles, long and slow. "Wouldn't have pegged you for it," she says wryly. "You ever take Miles to see them? He's into street art, isn't he?"

"As if he needs the encouragement."

"Fair enough," she says. She glances at him from out of the corner of her eye. "Bet he'd like it, though."

He exhales sharply. "I'll take it under advisement, Gonzalez."  _Drop it._

"That's all I'm saying, Davis."  _I will, but not because you're right._

He'd take her advice a lot more seriously if he weren't pretty sure that Aaron had spent the last few years molding Miles in his own image, and Jefferson has only recently started to get his Miles — the real Miles, he likes to think, although on bad days he's not sure — back. It wasn't as if the kid's love of street art spontaneously emerged out of nowhere. Or his all-consuming hero worship for his uncle, for that matter. And it's not as though Jefferson resented it, he really didn't, even on his worst days he never would have begrudged Aaron the one family connection the man had, but maybe he did resent him for taking Miles under his wing the way he did, making him so much like—

Well.  _Aaron._

Although maybe it wasn't Aaron who did that, Jefferson is starting to think. Maybe Miles has always had a bit of Aaron in him, ever since he was born, and it's only just showing up now he has the freedom to explore it.

(He's twenty-three and waiting in the lobby of the precinct, embarrassed and angry, while he waits for one of his new coworkers to retrieve his brother from the holding cell. He's twenty-five and storming away from Aaron after their last screaming match. He's twenty-six and standing by the door at his wedding reception, waiting for a car that will never come. He's forty-two and holding Aaron's body, still cooling in the purple armor, with a rogue gang of supervillains rampaging the streets behind him. He's sitting at his desk at a dark and empty precinct that night, struggling past the tightness in his chest as he types out the first lines of the report:  _Aaron Johnathan Davis, also known by the criminal alias of Prowler—_ )

They pull up to the building in silence.

 

* * *

 

He runs into Spider-Man one day. He doesn't mean to.

The kid is sitting on the fire escape when they arrive, legs dangling over the edge of the rail, while the elderly woman beside him chats in energetic Mandarin. The guy who robbed her apartment dangles from the bottom of the fire escape, hog-tied in web fluid, and the victim seems perfectly at ease. When they notice the police arriving, Spider-Man springs up nimbly to crouch on the railing, much like a bird ready to take flight.

"Hello, officers," he yells.

"Oh, fantastic," Sally mutters. "Webhead beat us to it."

"I don't think that's the name he prefers."

"This nice young man was helping me," the woman calls. "He was concerned you were going to arrest him. I told him you're not going to do that." She informs them of this as though she were handing down the writ of God, and they could no more make her a liar than they could instruct the sun not to shine.

"Ma'am, we're just here to collect your assailant," Sally says diplomatically.

"Good! Come get him, then."

Sally climbs up on the dumpster under the fire escape and gets to work cuffing the perp, grimacing all the while. Jefferson doesn't envy her the task. He knows from experience that web fluid is a pain to work around, being simultaneously sticky, rubbery, and stiff, and the last time he had to cut someone out of it, it took two hours and a scalpel.

He hangs back, watching. Slowly, out of his periphery, he sees a figure in black and red lower himself into view, hanging upside-down from a thread of webbing.

"Hello," he says, after a moment.

"Hey, Officer Davis," Spider-Man says, kind of hapless.

"How have you been?"

"Good. I've been good. How about — how about you, how have you been?"

"I've been doing fine."

"That's good."

Sally is still wrapped up dealing with the perp. Jefferson sighs and turns to face Spider-Man. "What are you still doing here?"

"Oh, you know," Spider-Man says nervously. "Meiling didn't feel all the comfortable with me leaving, considering what happened, so I made a deal with her that if she called the police, I'd hang out? Just nearby? In case something happened, you know. And I wouldn't hang around, cuz I know we're not exactly tight, me and the police, I mean, but Meiling was really shaken up, she doesn't show it but she is, and I felt bad leaving her alone. But now you're here, so I'll go. Also I don't want to get arrested."

"We're not gonna arrest you," Jefferson says, a little indignantly.

"What?" Spider-Man tilts his head. "Why not?"

"I — well, for one thing, we don't have the grounds."

"What grounds do you need?"

"Evidence of a crime, typically," Jefferson says flatly. "Stopping a robbery is hardly a criminal offense, son."

"What about past crimes?"

"Technically," Jefferson says, through gritted teeth, "since you and the previous Spider-Man were different entities, you cannot be held accountable for any of his misdemeanors."

"What about the, um," Spider-Man twirls his hand as though he's looking for a word, "the thing? The unlawful arrest thing?"

"First of all, if you know about that, you should _stop doing it_. Second of all," he says, folding his arms, "unlawful arrest is a _civil_ suit made by the plaintiff  _arrestee_  against a defendant  _arrestor_. I can't arrest you for it any more than I can arrest someone for breach of contract. Now, you could always get a court summons, although good luck delivering a court summons to Spider-Man." Spider-Man laughs good-naturedly. "Third of all," Jefferson says, begrudgingly, "intervening in cases where there was a clear and ostensible threat of violence is protected by Good Samaritan laws, so you're not technically at fault for that, either."

"Oh," Spider-Man says, considerably more cheerful. "So I can't be thrown in jail?"

"I wouldn't go that far. You're not above the law, young man, you're just like anybody else—"

"Yeah, yeah, but, like, for that specifically?"

"No," Jefferson says, aggrieved. "Not for that, _specifically_. _"_

"Great," Spider-Man chirps. "That makes things easier."

"Jefferson?" Sally calls. "Can you come help me out?"

Spider-Man freezes, and then retreats a little further up his thread. Jefferson notices.

"I told you, she can't arrest you."

"I know. It's just — I mean, I'm sure she's a really nice lady, but — you know how it's awkward, sometimes, when you're near someone who doesn't like you, and you know they don't like you, but you feel like maybe, if they tried to get to know you, they would like you? But you know they'll never try so it doesn't matter, except you can't stop thinking about it?"

It all comes out at once, in one long jumble of words, and Jefferson's brows knit as he tries to parse it out. "Do you know Sally?"

"No," Spider-Man yelps. "No. I don't. Who's Sally? Is that the woman over there?" 

"Kid," he says, "anyone ever tell you you're a terrible liar?"

Spider-Man sags. He drops to the ground, landing light on his feet. "Yeah," he says. He sounds so _disheartened_ about it, too, like he's seriously distraught. Guilt lances Jefferson in his side. "Not a great trait for someone with a secret identity, huh."

For the second time that year, Jefferson finds himself in the bizarre situation of comforting Spider-Man. "Well, hey, don't get down on yourself like that," he offers awkwardly. "There are worse things than being honest."

"Not if it could put people in danger."

"And you're worried that you might?" 

"Not really," Spider-Man says, wriggling with pent-up, frustrated energy. The movement is vaguely familiar to Jefferson, although he files that little detail away. "Maybe. Kind of. I don't know. Why are you asking?"

Jefferson, who has grown more and more uneasy since finding the kid on the ledge, asks, "How old are you, son?"

"Seventeen," Spider-Man says immediately, and from the split-second freeze that follows it, he knows he shot too high. Jefferson glares.

"How old are you really?"

"Fifteen."

It's possible, Jefferson thinks skeptically; some kids don't hit their growth spurt until late — but if he's fifteen, it's a very, very young fifteen. Which is hardly better than anything else. Either way, it makes Jefferson dizzy. "You should be in school," he says faintly.

Spider-Man cocks his head in a way that screams unimpressed aggravation. "It's a furlough day."

"I mean generally. You should be with other kids, doing homework, messing around, not — jumping around on rooftops and fighting crime."

"What's wrong with fighting crime, _Officer?"_

"Nothing, so long as you're a grown adult. Oh, God, you're not even old enough to drive, are you?"

"Last time I checked, I was being pretty helpful," Spider-Man huffs. 

"I'm not saying it's not  _helpful,_ I'm saying it shouldn't be  _you._ You should be focusing on school! On getting into college!"

"Peter Parker was Spider-Man while he was in school."

"Peter Parker was a twenty-six year old grad student, young man, it's not even remotely the same thing."

"Oh my God, this is stupid," Spider-Man snaps, stepping away. "I shouldn't even be arguing with you."

"Finally, something we agree on," Jefferson huffs.

Spider-Man webs the fire escape and swings himself up, hovering at eye level with Jefferson. "Do you have kids, Officer?" he asks quietly.

Jefferson startles at the question. "Yes," he says. "A boy. Miles."

"You ever ask him what he thinks of Spider-Man?"

He bristles. Who is this kid, this  _child,_ to tell him how to— "Yeah. He's a big fan of yours."

"But do you ever ask?"

"Of course I do," Jefferson snips. "Of course I a—"

"Are you sure?" Spider-Man presses. "I mean, have you ever just . . . asked him?"

There's something straining beneath the surface of his voice, a sharp live wire of fear — no, not fear, but something akin to it, anxiety infused with hope. Tremulous, petrified, lacquered over with false confidence. Someone staring off the edge of a dizzying height, trying to talk themselves into the jump.

"I know my son," he says firmly, instead of answering. Which is answer enough.

Spider-Man dips his head, hiding his face. Another vaguely familiar move, one that triggers an odd unease in Jefferson. "Yeah," Spider-Man says quietly. "Yeah, what do I know about it, anyway? Sorry to bother you, man."

Before Jefferson can say anything to that, he swings himself up the thread and swoops away, webbing the next building and vaulting it with a quick flip in midair. Then he's gone.

 

* * *

 

The following week isn't among the PDNY's finest. Multiple investigations hit dead ends. Meiling's robber gets out on bail. The drug case turns up null. Jefferson becomes dead certain that Miles is up to something, and equally convinced that he has no way of finding out what it is.

Skipping meals is just the beginning. It gets worse, as time goes on; and it's little things, nothing major, the kind of evidence that Jefferson would feel crazy trying to present in a case. Miles starts going on "morning runs," coming back chipper and sweaty, but he never wears out his shoes. He eats twice his body weight daily, but he never puts on fat or muscle. He grows three inches within what seems like the space of a month. He's always over at his friends' house, but it's rare to see any of his friends invited over in return. He calls the school again, out of desperation, and gets the same answer he did the first time:  _Miles is doing fine, Mr. Davis. Sometimes you have to let them go._

None of this serves as tenable proof of anything, he knows. Rio doesn't share his suspicions. She thinks it's wonderful that Miles is enjoying himself, living life, branching out in the new environment. To anybody else, he sounds like one of a million other paranoid, overbearing fathers, and he knows that. He does. But there's deductive reasoning and then there's father's instinct, and he  _knows_ something is wrong with Miles, he just  _knows_ it, in the same way that he knows he and his son don't talk as much as they should.

Then there's the other things. The things that aren't alarming so much as they're just . . . strange.

"Rio?" he calls, holding up what was once a crisp white linen shirt.

"Yeah?"

"Did you put your clothes in with my whites?"

"No, I ran a different load," she says. "Why?"

He lowers the effervescent pink article back down into the laundry basket, dejectedly. "No reason."

The door to the mud room swings open and Miles saunters through, headphones in, head bopping, a basket of laundry balanced on his hip. He freezes when he sees Jefferson, and quickly tugs the headphones down to hang around his neck.

"Oh, hi, Dad," he says. He glances at the basket of salmon pink shirts, and winces.

"I don't suppose you ran any of your clothes through with my shirts," Jefferson says drily.

"Yeah, um. About that."

"No, please, do tell."

"Thing is," Miles says quickly, "we're playing basketball in gym, right? And I needed to wash my uniform for the game tomorrow, or else Coach wouldn't let me play, but your shirts were already in there, and I figured, what's the harm . . . ?"

"Uh-huh."

"Which I realize now," he adds, just as hastily. "I won't do it ever again. I promise. And, uh, I'll pay you back for the shirts, Dad, honest."

That's a pleasant surprise, but it's the least of Jefferson's worries.

"Your uniforms are blue and white," he points out. Then he lifts the shirt, to hammer his point home.

"Oh," Miles says, eyes wide. "Are they?"

"You aren't sure?"

"Well, see, we have two separate uniforms, right? One for practice, and one for games."

"You have two separate uniforms for gym class. In different colors."

"Yeah," says Miles, with the faint hopelessness of someone who just realized that  _this_ is the cover story they're stuck with.

"One of which you had to wash so urgently that you threw it in. With my white shirts."

"Yep."

"And you couldn't wear the other uniform, just this once?"

"The other one is for games," Miles says. "This one's for practice."

Jefferson lifts an eyebrow. "I thought you needed this one because you had a game tomorrow."

Miles balks. He rocks on his heels. He stares at the ceiling, then stares at the floor. He hums.

Finally, he gives up, pivots, and heads for the door, all in the space of a few seconds. "Did I? Whoops! Uh, anyway, on second thought, I'm good on laundry."

"Miles," Jefferson calls, but the mud room door is already swinging in his wake.

 

* * *

 

It's odd enough in isolation. But it's not an isolated instance.

"Ganke invited me to stay over tonight," Miles says, hovering in the living room doorway. "Is that cool?"

"Of course," Rio says, before Jefferson can say anything. "How is he?"

"He's good. We're gonna catch up on some English homework together," Miles adds, and Jefferson knows it's for his benefit.

"Where does he live?" He forces himself to be casual. He doesn't ever want to assume Miles is lying to him, not unless he has tangible proof. He's met parents who assume their children are always lying to them. They rarely have good relationships with their children.

"Ganke? His mom's place is down in Park Slope. His dad lives in Sunset Park."

"Which are you going to tonight?"

There's a fraction of a second of hesitation before Miles says, "Mom's."

"Cool," Jefferson says. "You be sure to get that homework done."

"Course, Dad."

"What's his mom's name again?"

"Harin."

"Cool, cool. Well, have fun. Don't stay up too late. Don't fill up on junk food."

"I won't," he says, in a way that means  _I most definitely will,_ and waves goodbye. "See you tomorrow!"

"Nos vemos mañana, mijo."

"Chao, Mama!"

The door closes, and for a moment, the only sound is the burble of the television. Rio returns to her novel, idly turning a page. Jefferson stays in place for one, two, three minutes, counting the seconds until he knows Miles is probably out of the building.

Then he stands up. "I'm going to make a call," he announces. Rio hums her acknowledgement, still engrossed in her book. He heads into the kitchen and stoops to one of the smaller drawers, hauling out an ancient, weathered copy of the yellow pages. Flipping through waver-thin pages so frail they almost melt on his fingers, he hunts through tiny lines of bleeding black print until he finds the number under  _LEE, HARIN._  There are several of them, but only one that lives in Park Slope.

He dials with his cell. It rings twice before someone picks up.

"Hello?"

"Ms. Lee?"

"This is she," she says cautiously. "Who's this?"

"This is Jefferson Davis. I'm Miles' father."

"Oh! Hello, Officer Davis. It's nice of you to call." There's a question lying underneath it.

"I wanted to just . . . get some assurance on something," he says, choosing his words carefully. "I know I probably sound like a paranoid old man, but I was hoping you could give me some peace of mind."

"What's this about?"

He takes a deep breath. "Did Ganke invite Miles over?"

There's no immediate denial, but there is a pause. His heart rate spikes. "I wouldn't know," she says slowly.

"Ganke hasn't said?" That's fair, that's fine. Miles doesn't always give Jefferson notice when he's bringing a friend over. That's not unusual. It's fine.

"No," she says. A beat. "He's staying at his father's tonight."

Jefferson feels a bit weak in the knees.

"I see," he says. Then, "Sorry to bother you, Ms. Lee. Have a good night."

He hangs up.

 

* * *

 

And it might've lasted like that indefinitely — Miles dodging and evading, and Jefferson, always two steps behind — if not for this.

"Miles, what happened to your wrist?"

"Oh, this?" Miles whisks his arm out of the way before Jefferson can touch it, skittering out of his father's grasp. "Nothing."

"It's not nothing, you've got bruises!"

They're horrifying, the ugly flush of reddish purple that reaches up Miles' arm, stark and fading to grey around the edges. Miles yanks down his sleeve with a wince. "It's fine," he says.

"It's not! Go have your mother look at that right now—"

"It'll wear off on its own, I heal fast—"

"What if it's sprained?"

"It's not sprained," Miles mutters, with absolutely unjustified exasperation.

"How would you know?" Jefferson demands, and when Miles doesn't answer, his stomach drops even further. "Have you sprained your wrist _before?"_

"No."

"Miles."

"I haven't," Miles says, and Jefferson is once again reminded that his son is a terrible liar.

"Did Ganke do that to you?" he demands, herding Miles towards the kitchen, where the first aid supplies are stored. 

"No! Dad, what are you talking about? He would never!"

"But someone did."

"No."

"A kid at school," he guesses, running frantically through the list of people from Visions that he knows. "That Medina boy, he's a big guy, isn't he? Might've gotten carried away in gym, or—?"

"Fabio is my friend," Miles says hotly. "He wouldn't hurt me."

"Well,  _someone did,_ Miles!" Jefferson grabs the first aid kit and pries it open, fingers barely steady enough to hold the splint.

"I just tripped. It's nothing."

"You tripped and hit only your wrist?How stupid do you think I am?"

"I — it wasn't a big deal! I don't want it to be a thing!"

"No? I'll be the judge of that. Who was it?"

"It was an accident," Miles tries, as Jefferson tugs back his sleeve and starts wrapping the bruise. "Nothing serious. I'm pretty sure he didn't mean to hurt me, we just got carried away—"

"You were in a  _fight?"_

"No — well, it wasn't a  _fight_ fight, it was just a little scuffle, nobody meant for anybody to get hurt—"

_"Miles Morales!"_

"It was fine! I'm fine, I'm okay, you're the only one making a big deal about it!"

"I think I'm entitled! You getting in a fight is a serious issue!" Jefferson ties off the bandages and fumbles for the splint. He feels hoarse. "I can't understand why you'd do this. You know how dangerous it is, you  _know_ how seriously it could jeopardize your future if—"

"Oh, here we go again."

"Don't you take that attitude with me, young man, this is serious."

"You just want to believe that something's wrong! You aren't listening to me, you're just assuming the worst! Don't you trust me?"

"That's not what this is about. Don't act like that's what this is about."

"It's exactly what this is about! You don't trust me, just like you didn't trust Uncle A—"

To his credit, Miles cuts himself off fast. But not fast enough.

"No," Jefferson hears himself say. "Finish the sentence."

Miles swallows. "Uncle Aaron," he says. "He told me—"

"What?" Jefferson says, suppressing a bubble of hysterical laughter, because isn't it just like him, isn't it  _just like Aaron,_ to find some way to screw things up from beyond the grave. "What did he tell you? Did he tell you how when he was nineteen, I had to bail him out because he'd been caught stealing from Oscorp? Did he tell you about his battery convictions? No? How about four months and twenty-five thousand dollars in property damages? No, let me guess: it was always fun and games, with Aaron, running around and doing whatever you want and leaving other people to clean up after your mistakes!"

"Why are you so mad at me?" Miles demands, his eyes shimmering. "I'm  _fine!"_

 _"No, you're_   _not,_ Miles!"

Jefferson doesn't realize how loud it was until the silence that comes after it.

Miles' chin lifts, curt and defiant, as he tries to pull away. Jefferson instinctively tightens his grip on the bruised arm, and Miles hisses under his breath.

Jefferson drops his hands as if they've been burned.

They regard each other for a moment.

Rio sweeps into the kitchen, her hair disheveled, still wearing her jacket. "What's going on?" she demands. "Jeff, what's happening? Miles?"

Miles hides his hand behind his back. She notices. "What happened to your wrist?" she asks, more bewildered than angry. "Are you all right?"

Jefferson says, "Miles—"

Miles pushes past her and storms out.

 

* * *

 

Shortly after Miles was born, Jefferson went to visit his father.

Martin Davis had moved back to Glendale after their mother died. Looking for familiarity, Jefferson supposed, or something like that. He never asked. His father was a kind but quiet person, and he didn't talk much to anybody, especially in his older years. He was shy. Mild-mannered. An accountant by trade, and something of a math genius; he could do things with numbers that would make an economist's head spin. Still, not the most impressive of figures. He collected stamps, which he kept in a shiny leather book that he would sometimes take down and let Jefferson look at, as a child, if he'd been good. He dressed for work every morning in a crisp collared shirt, a tie, and an argyle sweater-vest, and drove an electric car because it was better for the environment. He could find the silver lining in a thundercloud, and he loved Miles more than anything. So far as Jefferson could tell, he fell out of contact with Aaron after the brothers grew apart, and it was never clear whether it was a matter Martin choosing Jefferson over Aaron or Aaron choosing himself over everyone else. For years Jefferson didn't know how to feel about that. He still doesn't.

Martin died when Miles was four, and he left the house in Glendale to Aaron. Jefferson supposed that there were some things about your parents that you never understood.

The afternoon that he came over, they sat together on the back porch and drank lemonade. It was a fine, beautiful spring day. The deck was dappled by the shade of the cottonwood tree, and a cluster of lilacs was emerging by the stoop. Martin sat and scattered breadcrumbs for the birds. In his later years, his dark curls had been layered with a dusting of grey, and spots of age dotted his face. Still, he could make his way around without help, and he waved Jefferson off when he tried to help him down the porch steps.

"Dad, please, let me—"

"I'm fine."

"I don't want you to get h—" 

"I said I'm fine, young man."

". . . I'm twenty-eight."

"You could be old as Methuselah and it wouldn't matter, Jefferson. I changed your diapers. You're always 'young man' to me."

Martin had a way of biting off retorts like this pleasantly, in a soft-spoken voice that took any real sting out of it. Jefferson huffed and let his father wander down the stairs by himself, hovering anxiously at his elbow. "Look," Martin said, pointing at the cottonwood tree. "The robins have grown up."

Jefferson cast a cursory glance at the aforementioned robin's nest. A few shards of baby blue eggshell littered the tiny knot of briars, tucked comfortably in the niche where one branch split from another, and dark, naked head of an infant bird peered judiciously over the edge. It eyed the ground with what Jefferson felt was quite understandable suspicion, and then let out a severechirpat its mother,as if to say, _You want me to do WHAT?_

"That's nice, Dad," he said patiently.

"I watched those ones hatch. That one's a fighter. My money's on her to fly." Martin settled himself down on the bottom step of the porch and patted the space beside him. Jefferson sat.

"Do they not always?"

"No," Martin said thoughtfully. "Sometimes they fall and die."

Jefferson cringed. "Oh."

"It's very sad."

"Yeah, I imagine." He glanced uneasily back at the nest. The baby chick was still prowling around the edge, fluffing out its downy wings.

"But that's the way it works," Martin said. "That's what makes it impressive, when they do. The best ones always fly."

"It's brutal for the rest," Jefferson noted.

"Yes. Of course it is. Nature is brutal. She has to be, to do her job. She takes care of the failures, and she makes things right again in the spring." He paused. "Anyway, if you ask me, that's fatherhood."

"Oh?"

"Yes. That bird right there, it's either going to fall, and die, or it's going to succeed, and one way or another it's going to get there by trying. And you don't know which it's going to do until it does. You can't predict it. You can predict all sorts of things — births, deaths, flight patterns, anything biological — but you cannot predict mettle."

Jefferson said, "I see."

Martin peered at him, and grinned. "No, you don't," he said.

"No, I don't."

"You think that you're the daddy robin," he said. "You think that fatherhood is helping your kid leave the nest. Feeding them wisdom. Watching from a distance as they take their first steps — is that it?"

"Is it not?"

"Hell no," Martin said. "You're the baby bird."

 

* * *

 

Rio gets ready for bed the same way every night. He's watched her do it enough times that he could recite it by memory, every step, every movement of those long, careful fingers, as she winds her hair into a lavender satin cap, washes her face in the bathroom mirror — firm, rhythmic strokes of the cloth, over each eye, then the forehead, then the cheeks. No energy wasted. No time for idle hands. She wrings out her towel and hangs it on the left side of the bathroom sink, opposite his shaving kit and toothbrush, and then squeezes a small white dollop of lotion on the back of each hand. Williams Sonoma Meyer, lemon-scented, no substitutes. Jefferson's seen it on grocery lists for eighteen years; even after that much time, she still writes out the brand name every time, as if he doesn't know, because he got it wrong once when they were first dating. He hasn't since, but she still tells him, just like she tells him what brand of toilet paper to pick up and what shampoo she prefers. Always practical, always matter-of-fact. When she's done in the bathroom, she does her evening stretches, reaching first for the sky and then the ground. Left hand to right wrist, pull across the body, hold. Right hand to left wrist, repeat. Sometimes she'll indulge in a cup of peppermint tea if she's feeling luxurious, ice water if she's not. She sleeps in sweats and a baggy t-shirt that's run through with holes, threadbare, grey, the design faded from going a couple hundred rounds with the washing machine. Jefferson thinks it's his, but he can't be sure.

He's simpler. He's almost always in bed before she is, parked as far away from the center as he can be without falling off, because Rio is sweet as sunshine but she kicks like a mule in her sleep.

She climbs under the covers with a copy of  _Gravity's Rainbow_ and he says, "Light reading?"

"Just to put me to sleep," she says.

"I remember Pynchon. I read him in college."

"Mm." She leans against his shoulder, which he just knows means she's going to fall asleep there, and he resigns himself to a night of being pummeled. "Did you like him?"

"I liked him better than Joyce," he allows. Rio snorts. Jefferson hates Joyce, and they both know it.

"The other nurses are reading him for book club. I thought I'd follow along."

"Are you in this book club?"

"No," she yawns, "but I hate being out of the loop at lunch," and then she slips out her bookmark, a strip of purple ribbon with frayed ends.

He retrieves his newspaper from the bedside table and she wordlessly passes him a pair of reading glasses. She's bought him half a dozen pairs, but out of some stubborn reluctance to recognize that he needs them, he always manages to willfully misplace them, one way or another, and ends up borrowing hers. 

They read together for what might be a long time. Might be only a few minutes. He isn't sure. It's a Sunday night, which means Miles is home, although you wouldn't know it, from the silence radiating from the bedroom down the hall. 

"I think you should smooth things over with Miles tomorrow," Rio murmurs.

"Hm."

"He seemed really upset." She turns her face into his arm, shuffling to get more comfortable. "I don't know what you said to him, but he's taken it seriously."

"Hmm."

"I hate the idea of sending him off to school when you two are in a bad place. We already don't see him that much as it is." She closes her book and turns, resting her chin on his shoulder. "It wouldn't be a bad idea to make up with him. Even if it's just for my own peace of mind."

He nods.

"Querido." She taps his arm. "¿Me oyes?"

"I wish Aaron were here," he says quietly.

She pulls back a little, and then sits up straight, rubbing small circles on his shoulder. She doesn't speak. She waits.

"He was always so good with Miles. Miles respected him. He listened to him. He hung off his every word, and I—"

Her thumb falters, then continues in its same rhythmic rotation over his left shoulder blade.

"I wish he were here," he says. It isn't what he meant to say. It seems like very little of what he says, these days, is ever what he meant to say.

"Miles listens to you," she says. Softer: "More than you think."

"What does that mean?"

"It means children hear everything," she says. "And worse, they remember."

"Aaron—"

"Was a good person, and a good uncle, and he's not here anymore. You're what he has."

"Miles won't—"

"Aaron was the person Miles needed at the time," she says firmly. "But he's gone."

He says nothing. After a while, she rolls over and clicks off her bedside light.

 

* * *

 

That morning, there are spiderweb strands laced up and down their building's fire escape. Jefferson sighs, and lets them be for the time being. Apparently the webbed crusader made a pit stop in their neighborhood. That's fine. He didn't have afternoon plans, anyway.

"You know, one thing they don't tell you about web fluid, in the news," he says conversationally, backing out of the driveway. Miles hasn't said a word to him that morning. That's fine. It's fine. They're fine. "Take it from someone who's had to deal with it more times than he'd prefer to count. The stuff impossible to get off. Practically impermeable, sticky as tar. In terms of annoyance, it's second only to glitter and play-dough, if you ask me. Whatever he makes that nonsense out of, it's hardcore."

Miles grunts.

"How do you figure he makes it, anyway?" Jefferson risks a glance in the rearview. "That always creeped me out. That ever creep you out? Not knowing where it comes from? Does he excrete it?"

Miles chokes on a hastily repressed peal of laughter, and Jefferson smiles.

"I mean, that'd be gross, right? Am I the only one who thinks that's gross?"

"Dad, stop."

"I'm serious! You know how real spiders make web fluid, right? You ever watch that one documentary about it?"

"No one watches your dumb documentaries," Miles groans, and he's annoyed, but annoyed is better than nothing. Annoyed is talking. Annoyed is a start.

"You know, I met him, the other day," Jefferson tries. "Spider-Man."

"Uh huh."

"No, I did!" He half turns towards the backseat to demonstrate his earnestness, although he keeps his eyes on the road. "He showed up at a crime scene. He, uh, did a bunch of kickflips and . . . parkour? Is that the word?"

". . . sure."

"He asked me about being jailed for unlawful arrest, actually. Which was surprising, because I didn't figure that vigilantes cared much about the law at all."

"It's a civil suit, anyway, isn't it," Miles says disinterestedly.

"Yes! That's what I told him." Jefferson peers at him in the rearview mirror. He's slumped against the window, head pressed to the glass. "How do you know that?"

"My friend is a lawyer."

"What friend?"

"Does it matter?" Miles looks at him for the first time since last night, and it's with a hard, dull expression. Jefferson backpedals fast.

"No, of course not. I just thought you'd find that cool." 

"What? Spider-Man?" It's an odd tone, some kind of precarious balance between uneasy and amused.

"Don't you like Spider-Man? You used to love Spider-Man. I remember buying you box sets of his comics for your birthdays."

Miles blows out a long breath. "It's complicated," he says.

"Tell me about it," Jefferson encourages.

Miles gives him another Look. "No, thanks."

Jefferson tries anyway. "I'll admit, I prefer the remix to the original," he says lightly. "At least this one cares enough to ask about unlawful arrest."

"Oh my God."

"But still, he's kind of dorky, huh? Don't get me wrong, I still like him more than the old guy. Anything beats the old guy. That man could be a real smart-aleck, sometimes, one of those big-mouthed kids who think they're ten foot tall and bulletproof. You know I can't stand that kind of person, no matter how strong or smart or cool they look on TV. I don't care how good you are, nobody's better than the rules, and this new kid, he seems to understand that. Or at least, he appreciates the  _theory._  But he's also so young. You get the feeling he really doesn't know what he's getting into. Talking to him, I just wanted to go hunt down his parents and—"

"Can we please not talk about this," Miles says, loudly.

And so they don't, for the rest of the ride to school.

Jefferson doesn't know what he did wrong. He was just trying to make conversation, but then, maybe Miles doesn't want to talk to him about anything, no matter how banal.

They pull up to the curb outside Visions and Miles  _bails_ , hauling his suitcase after him like he can't get out of the car fast enough. Jefferson scrambles to roll down the passenger side window, calling, "Miles," hoping it doesn't sound as desperate as it feels.

Miles stops in his tracks, and trudges up to the open window. Puts his hand on the door. Doesn't get back in, but doesn't leave, either. It makes Jefferson hopeful that he's still giving his father the benefit of the doubt.

Jefferson reaches over and turns off the radio, and then there's nothing in the world but him and Miles and the dull dead quiet space between them.

_Take a leap of faith._

"I'm proud of you," he says.  _Baby birds._ "And I love you. And, and — and sometimes I say things I don't mean, or don't say the things I should, that was always the difference between me and — you know, but point is, I don't always know what to say. But _that_  — that's always true, and—"

"Dad."

"Yeah?"

Miles leans on the window, and quirks a smile. "I know," he says, like it's as obvious as the color of the sky, as science, as quadratic equations, another fundamental truth of nature he's filed away in that amazing, beautiful brain of his.

"You do?"

"Dad," he says, "anyone ever tell you you're a terrible liar?"

And when he smiles, it's not Aaron's casual smirk that greets Jefferson, but Martin's, clever and sharp, with that _gotcha_ of a grin he flashed whenever he'd caught you off your guard.

Jefferson wants to be here, in the present, enjoying a nice moment with his son. He wants to be relishing this unfamiliar scrap of hope that somehow, things are going to turn out all right. He wants to be  _here._ But his mind, his detective's mind, his relentlessly anal-retentive detail-oriented _police officer's_ mind, is halfway across Brooklyn, staring down a kid in a black-and-red mask.

"Yeah," he says, with what little breath is left in his lungs. "Might've heard that one before."

The school bell screeches. Miles waves to a gaggle of his friends who are hovering by the entrance, and then turns back to Jefferson. "Gotta go," he says cheerfully. He doesn't know what his dad is imagining, Jefferson thinks guiltily; he doesn't have a clue. "Don't wanna be late."

"Of course. Of course, go on. Get."

"See you Friday?"

"See you Friday," Jefferson confirms, and as Miles is swinging around to tug his backpack up the stairs, he calls, "Love you."

"Love you, too," Miles says, loud and clear and unashamed, flashing a peace sign and a grin over his shoulder.

Jefferson bleakly thinks that it's ironic — how the one time a conversation with Miles goes exactly how Jefferson wants it to, he can't enjoy it.

 

* * *

 

Skipping meals. Morning runs. Rushing out.  _(To do what? That's circumstantial evidence.)_  Lots of homework; impromptu sleepovers. Study sessions with friends who never come over. Lying about his whereabouts.  _(Once, that you know of. No signs of a trend.)_ Eating more. No weight gain. Suggestions of a fast, nigh hyperactive metabolism.  _(He's on the verge of puberty, what do you expect?)_  Running shoes that never wear through. Unexplained absences. Bad excuses, fast deflections.  _(In other words, he's a teenager.)_ Bruises from a fight he swears didn't happen.  _(It could still be something else.)_

Ace bandages and baby powder.  _(Never did explain that one.)_

An entire load of white shirts, turned pink. _(Well, the suit has to get washed sometimes.)_

Spider-Man hugged him.  _(Miles is an affectionate kid.)_ Spider-Man has always been a little too comfortable around Jefferson, even when he keeps a hefty distance from any other officer of the law.  _(He can't help but trust you.)_ Miles came home crying the day Peter Parker was killed  _(did you ever find out where he really was that night?)_ and goes missing around the same time that pack of weirdos from another dimension showed up  _(unexplained absences, even Visions can't account for where he was)._ He knew Aaron was dead before Jefferson said a word.  _(The report wasn't released for three days, how did he know? How could he have known?)_

A fire escape dressed in white webbing, even though their neighborhood is one of the safest in the city.  _(You need to tread carefully, here.)_

"You don't have to say it back," isn't that what he said? And Spider-Man, after the fight with Kingpin—  _(Are you looking at every option? Every possibility? Is this the truth, or just the easiest thing to believe?)_

It isn't a plausible theory, not by any reputable standard of evidence. It's laughably far from "beyond a reasonable doubt." It's too much to be stomached under the guise of coincidence, though, either.

 _(But are you_ sure? _)_

...

_(You can't go forward with this unless you're sure.)_

 

* * *

 

Jefferson is late for his first case that morning. Having a panic attack in the parking lot will do that to you, although he says it's because there was bad traffic coming back from dropping off Miles. At nine o'clock on a Monday morning, no one questions him. 

They get a call from some civilian complaining about spiderwebs left up on his roof, demanding that someone come clean it off, and even though it's usually the kind of grunt work they would send some unfortunate rookie to slog through, Jefferson takes it because he needs something to clear his mind. Odds are if he stays at the precinct today he's going to go stir-crazy sitting at his desk. Being out and about is a distraction he needs desperately, and so he volunteers, despite the bevy of odd looks that get leveled his way.

"I tried explaining to him," says Mark, a round-faced first-year-out from the Academy who still hasn't quite learned when a  _Oh, really_ means  _Keep your mouth shut and do your job,_ "that we're not technically liable for any damages or inconveniences caused by the actions of vigilantes, but he wouldn't listen to me." He's flushed and sweaty from the six flights of stairs they had to climb to get to the roof, and he keeps shooting nervous glances at the edge. Afraid of heights, Jefferson would bet, or bad vertigo. 

"Oh, really."

"And when I tried explaining that to the captain, he just said that someone had to do it, and sometimes if you don't do something yourself it'll never get done, and—"

"Oh, really," Jefferson repeats, pulling out a boxcutter and some gloves. The webbing isn't that bad, really, it's just a few strands laced around the antennae that rises from the center of the roof, but it's still probably going to be an hour's worth of work getting it done.

Mark isn't fazed by the interruption. He wanders around the roof idly, contemplating his shoes, while Jefferson gets to work. "Yeah. And so I was like, 'But that's still not our jurisdiction, man!' And he didn't say anything." He pauses, and in a truly startling moment of internal clarity, asks, "You think he was just trying to get me out of the precinct?"

"Yes," says Jefferson bluntly, stripping through a strand of webbing with one swift stroke, before considering that maybe Mark's skin is on the thinner side. He amends, "But you don't want to be in the office today, anyway. Trust me."

"Why not?"

"There's an HR meeting this afternoon. Sending you out was probably a sign that he likes you, all things considered."

"Really?" Mark brightens. "You think he likes me?"

"As much as he likes anybody," Jefferson says, which is much more of a non-answer than Mark realizes, but it allows him to assume the best, and Jefferson deduces fairly easily that Mark is the kind of person who likes to assume the best.

A flash of color peers out from under the web strand. Looks like some kid left a tag on the concrete base of the antenna, which Jefferson has to admit is pretty unorthodox, as tags go — generally the point is to put them where people will  _see_ them — but whatever, it's not Jefferson's problem. Seems like a lot of work to get all the way up here just to leave a tag, too. If you're going to put in the effort to get six stories above street level, you might as well go all out.

He peels away another sticky film of webbing, brushing some residue off his fingers, and unveils more of the tag. It's a nice piece of work, he admits. With the part of his brain that doesn't strictly disapprove of any and all forms of vandalism, he can appreciate a fine use of color, an effective employment of contrast. He did this for long enough that he knows when someone's technique is good, and whoever put this here had decent technique. Too bad they put it where no one could see it.

He wonders if Spider-Man might have thrown it up, which offers a momentary amusement and then a swift influx of dread. He can't wonder about things like that, not when he's been thinking about what he's been thinking about; not when the ground there is so uncertain, so tender. That association isn't helping the flutter of worry in the back of his throat, which pulses like a frenzied butterfly every time he so much as casts a spare thought towards Miles.

With perhaps unnecessary force, he carves away another swath of webbing, and then rips it off. It goes with a sound like straw snapping, and the rest of the tag appears. His eyes glide over it, at first, focusing on the next strand of the web, and here's the thing: he almost doesn't see it. He almost moves right on with the task at hand and then his job and maybe the rest of his life, maybe there's a world where he doesn't see the tag and everything stays the same. 

But he does.

"Officer Davis?" Mark, noticing that Jefferson has fallen still, breaks off whatever he was saying. "You okay there?"

Jefferson can't answer. He can't bring himself to speak. There's a pit in his stomach and it's growing, awning open like a sinkhole under concrete. He wishes he could say that he was panicking, but panic is a response to fear, and fear implies hope. Fear implies that the worst, in fact, has not happened, and is yet to be dreaded. He's not afraid, not precisely. The sinkhole in his abdomen swallows everything, even fear.

There's nothing left. There's only the certainty, which settles into his brain a stake of ice.

He brushes his fingers across the sticker, tracing the elegant flourish of bubble letters, the stylish swirls of color.

It's Miles'.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With great thanks to Lou (@vanillacorpse on tumblr) for all their help!

The underground is cool and damp this time of year. To be fair, it's cool and damp every time of year. That's the nice thing about the underground. It never changes.

Footsteps ricochet off the old tunnels like gunfire. The asynchronous drip of ancient pipes and the muffled rattle of the subway somewhere in the distance layer a slim cover of white noise over the all-encompassing silence, which radiates throughout the hollowed caverns below the city like a physical thing.all smells of wet metal and sulfur and the usual kinds of things that grow in damp, dark places. Reedy green light sends shadows waltzing across the walls. It The brick crumbles, as it can't help but do, when it's got about twenty tons of city on top of it and that's a thought he can't hold onto for too long because despite having drilled it out of himself pretty well, Jefferson has a mild case of claustrophobia, which tends to act up in moments of stress.

Owing to the unhappy rushing in his ears every time he looks up and sees nothing but brick above him, he's pretty sure this is a moment of stress. Then again, he's not sure. The sinkhole hasn't closed yet. It has, however, stopped growing. So there's something.

He’s a little older than he was when he found this place, but to his private satisfaction, he’s still spry enough to hop the fence. Then again, he’s old enough to use the word _spry,_ so maybe it’s a pyrrhic victory, all things considered.

There are tunnels within tunnels, in this place, long labyrinths of winding corridors that split and twist and lace over each other into the dark until you don't stand a chance of finding the sun again. He and Aaron had plumbed them all, once, armed with nothing but flashlights and spray paint and determination. Always so determined, so brave. So intent on finding something new down there, as if that would make them own it. As if laying claim to something else made them more real. If he listens hard enough, he imagines he can still hear the echoes of their laughter bouncing off the curved walls. If the subway system really is as infinite as it seems, then maybe somewhere out there the sound is still going, spiraling indefinitely into the recesses of New York's underground, the last part of his baby brother that still exists.

If Jefferson believed in ghosts — and he doesn't — he knows he'd find Aaron's here. He'd round the corner and there he'd be, that short, skinny, pimple-ridden kid rocking a jacket three sizes too big for him because he thought it'd look cool, hairline messed up something awful because he tried to do his own fade in the bathroom mirror, sixteen, smiling like he's got a secret even God doesn't know, still ten foot tall and bulletproof.

"Damn, you got old, man," he'd say.

"You didn't," Jefferson would say back.

"Nah," Aaron would laugh. "What are you talking about? I'm gonna live forever."

He turns the corner. No one's there.

The place he used to go has been closed off since he was a teenager, so he keeps wandering around the tunnels until he finds a dead-end chamber. Sits down on the cold floor, takes stock of his surroundings. There's not much. The walls are papered over with art, most of it faded or washed out, since spray paint and mildew don't mix in any way fit to last. A couple of tags, some catchphrases, a scattering of profanity, basic iconography. That's how he knows none of it's Aaron's. Aaron's stuff always had this surrealist bent, discordant colors, weird imagery. Uncannily proportioned bodies, stretched and laced with odd dabs of color. Innovative. Brilliant, even.

He'd always said that if Aaron just cut it out with the vandalism and actually got around to putting a portfolio together, he'd make a great artist.

"I'm a great artist already," he'd say. 

But a real artist, Jefferson would persist. One who paints things that get hung in museums, and gets respect, and notoriety, and attention, Aaron, you could do it if you wanted, don't you want to try?

"My art can't get shut up in a museum," he'd say, as if surprised by the very suggestion. "It'd die in there."

What's that supposed to mean?

"It belongs out here. With the people."

Oh, the _people_. Of course.

"It belongs to the public," Aaron would clarify. Jefferson would roll his eyes. Well, he wouldn't now. But he used to. And after a while, Aaron stopped trying to explain it to him, when the subject came up. When was it, exactly? All of that feels so long ago.

It's not as though he didn't understand. Jefferson used to do it, too. Popped open a can of spray paint, striped a block, tagged a wall. Easy as breathing. Never thinking about vandalism and trespassing and property damage, never bothering to look over his shoulder. It felt too natural to be wrong, because it hadn't occurred to him that beautiful things could be wrong yet. In that paint there was a truth more honest than speech. In that paint there was a lifetime's worth of words, giving voice to a stifled and unutterable desire to be seen, to be witnessed, even if just in a sidelong glance from a passerby. The tag: a name, a declaration. _I'm here!_  it cries. _I'm here! I'm here! I mattered!_

One flick of the wrist, and the world is wearing your colors, now. You've signed yourself in to the universe; enjoy your stay, you'll be leaving soon. Impermanent bodies marking less impermanent stone. Rupert Brooke, paraphrased:  _If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever Brooklyn._

Jefferson never liked Brooke much.

He draws his knees up and leans on them, feeling the burn of muscles that haven't been stretched in a while. The older he gets, the more things seem to ache without reason. Back aches for no reason. Knees ache for no reason. Heart aches for no reason at all.

"I just can't believe you settled down," says the sixteen-year-old who isn't in the room. "It's one thing to ask someone out. Even you can do that. But how you get a girl to _marry_ you, game like yours?"

Jefferson smiles, in spite of himself, and breaks his rule about talking to ghosts. "You'll understand, once you meet Rio."

"She blind or something?"

"Ha, ha. She's . . . Rio. Like I said, you understand once you meet her."

He considers this. "Do we get along?"

"Like vinegar and baking soda."

"Aw, man. Now I'm looking forward to it. How long does it take you to meet her?"

"Twenty-four years," he says. "And three more to ask her out."

"What'd she say?"

"She politely informed me that we'd already been dating for six months. I figured it was better not to argue with her, act like I'd known the whole time."

The teenager nods, sagely. "That's the play," he agrees. "Keep it smooth, keep it classy. Always make it seem like you're holding it together."

Jefferson snorts. "I'm beginning to realize why you never got married."

"Hey, spoilers, dude!"

"No, it isn't," Jefferson begins, and then trails off as he remembers that he isn't really spoiling anything at all. He can't unveil the rest of Aaron's life to him, because he hasn't been talking to him.

He's been sitting alone in an empty maintenance tunnel under the subway system for twenty minutes, in dead silence, thinking about what he'd say if his dead brother were still here. Because he found out that his son was Spider-Man and he couldn't take it, and he ran to the last place he remembered feeling safe from the rest of the world.

It didn't work. The reason he stopped coming down here is because he realized that nowhere is safe. Not the tunnels, not the streets. Not even the things that are most important to you. The world doesn't care where you hide. It follows you in.

He remembers holding Miles only minutes after his birth, still squalling, swaddled up like a loud, angry burrito in one of the hospital's blue baby blankets. Face wrinkled in the way that all newborns' are. Not a day old and already demanding attention, demanding to be heard, as if to say: _Keep an eye on me, everyone, I'm going to be important_. Jefferson didn't doubt it for a second. He knew after taking one look at him. He didn't need to be told.

He remembers crouching on the rug in their living room, Rio opposite him, with a pudgy-limbed and round-faced Miles balanced in her lap.  _Come on, Miles,_ he cooed, holding out his hands.  _Come on, I'm here. Daddy's here. Come on over, little guy, you're all right._ And Miles, brow furrowed in concentration, had placed one trembling foot in front of the other, arms wide for balance, as he took his first tottering steps across the rug. Halfway across, he stumbled, faltered, and almost toppled headfirst onto the floor, but Jefferson was faster, sweeping him up and righting him.  _I've got you,_ he said, as Miles shrieked with laughter, and Rio breathed a sigh of relief.  _Don't worry, I've got you. I always do._

He remembers driving Miles in to his first day of kindergarten in the cruiser. Miles pressed his face flat against the glass and clamored for Dad to 'do the siren, pleasepleaseplease?' and whining when Jefferson wouldn't, although he was easily enough appeased by the offering of a popsicle. At the classroom door, he had clung to Jefferson's hand as if being drawn feet first into hell, and it was only Jefferson's coaxing and the lure of another popsicle that managed to pry him free. Jefferson's first attempt to leave set the entire ordeal back an hour, at least.  _When are you coming back?_ he demanded, with the wide-eyed terror of a child whose faith in some fundamental force of nature just been uprooted,  _where are you going? Why can't I come?_  And Jefferson said,  _I'll be back soon. You'll be okay. You're a big boy, you'll be all right on your own._

And he was. And Jefferson had been unfathomably, incomprehensibly saddened by it.

He remembers Miles coming back from his first art class with stars in his eyes and stains on his fingertips, babbling about colors and shapes and figures and how everything made sense when it was just him and the empty page. All afternoon, he talked of nothing else. He'd had interests before, of course, but nothing that lit him up the way that art did, nothing that made joy sing out from underneath his every movement, and nine years old was a little young to discover his passion but Jefferson knew what love was when he saw it written on his son's face. He went out that night and bought a hundred dollars' worth of art supplies, sketchbooks and markers and paints and the artesian pencils with different softnesses of graphite, rubber erasers, creamy white paper with quality you could feel between your fingers, and when he presented them to Miles the next morning Miles looked at him like he'd caught sunlight in his bare hands. He looked at him like Jefferson always imagined you might look at God, and it felt so good it hurt to breathe.

He remembers Miles starting middle school, with the turbulent storms of adolescence lurking on the horizon, but still distant enough not to think about them. He remembers sitting down for the first parent-teacher conference, teeth set and stomach churning, because he knows Miles is smart, he _knows_ Miles is brilliant, he knows, but he's not sure they'll recognize it; and he remembers one of the teachers laying down a flawless report card, their expression vaguely stunned, and saying,  _You've got a very gifted child, Mr. Davis._ He resisted the urge to crow,  _I know. I've always known._

He remembers Miles' face falling as he learns that he made the cut for Visions, and Jefferson's absolute astonishment when he tried to decline.  _Why don't you want to succeed?_ he'd demanded, over the long, quiet car ride back from the school tour.  _Don't you see what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity this is? I'd have killed to go to a school like Visions._ Never thinking that maybe Miles would have his own reasons. Only thinking of how Jefferson couldn't live with himself if Miles' circumstances impeded him from doing the best he could. How Jefferson would go to his grave regretting it if anything he did lead to Miles losing one ounce of that raw, incredible potential that Jefferson sees. He isn't angry at Miles. He's anxious. He wants to grab the world and shake it:  _Look at him! Look what he's becoming! It's incredible!_ _Don't you see?_

He remembers slipping out of touch with his son in bits and pieces, in silent meals and short conversations, all the while hearing more and more of Aaron's name. He tried to force it back together, but the more he pressed, the more Miles shifted in the other direction, like trying to force two identical poles of a magnet. _You have to say it back._ Positive to positive, negative to negative, and every time he reached out Miles went flying away.  _That's a copy._ Even when his son was only parroting the words he wanted to hear, Jefferson could still imagine he meant them.

Jefferson would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, and hating himself for not trusting Aaron with Miles, although never quite enough to stop doing it. See, it wasn't that he didn't trust Aaron, he convinced himself. It was just that Aaron wasn't good with kids. He wouldn't take care to teach Miles all the things that an adult ought to teach him, to show him the dangers of certain kinds of behavior, and offer the appropriate disclaimers about his laissez-faire lifestyle. It was a matter of discretion, not trust. Family was family, but that didn't mean you had to ignore obvious faults. That didn't mean you had to just hand them the most precious thing in your universe.

He remembers:  _I love you. You don't have to say it back._

He remembers Miles, lying limp and open in the swirling neon light of a portal, a man who'd already killed one Spider-Man looming over him with every intent to kill another. No one in the world to help. No one in the world to bear witness. Only Jefferson, locked behind a glass wall, and still goddamn useless even if he hadn't been, because what could he do? He isn't a superhero. He wouldn't last ten seconds against the people that Spider-Man was up against, not those freaks in neon costumes with monstrous powers, he _couldn't_. If Miles needed him, he'd have been helpless. He couldn't have kept him safe.

The most important thing in his universe is running around every night on the rooftops of Brooklyn, flinging his life into peril for the sake of any odd stranger that stumbles his way, because Miles has a heart like a supergiant star and it overflows with a love so bright he  _glows_  from it, and Jefferson has never been angry about his son's kindness before but now he is. Now he is, because Miles is already coming home with bruises and he's only been at it for six months, and even a decade's worth of experience wasn't enough to save the first Spider-Man. One of these day's he's going to come home seriously hurt or he won't come home at all and Jefferson will be able to do _absolutely nothing,_  and maybe if he's lucky he won't have to write the report this time.

He presses his forehead to his knees. The world presses down on top of him, all twenty tons of it.

 

* * *

 

Dinner is near silent. Miles is away at school and Rio's shift runs late, so he waits for her to get home and orders some takeout. The owner takes one look at Jefferson's face and throws in a couple extra fortune cookies.

Something about being read so easily rubs Jefferson the wrong way. But then, it's not like the guy is wrong.

How else does he waste time? It seems like he's alone in their house for hours, just waiting. The news is playing, but he can't sit still for that long, so he paces the living room. Scans their library, pulls out a book. Makes it four pages in before giving up and going back to pacing. Puts on some music. That doesn't help. Washes the dishes. That doesn't help. Does the laundry, cleans their bedroom, takes out the trash, none of it helps. Considers trying to cut down the webbing on their fire escape, but can't do more than poke his head out the window before quailing in the face of it and turning back. Gets the idea in his head to drive to Visions and hash it out with Miles then and there, and the appealing inertia behind that idea carries him pretty far — all the way to the front door, jacket retrieved, keys in hand, heart thudding — before it occurs to him that Miles might not be in his room right now. Given the time of night, Miles might not be at Visions at all. So he makes himself put his keys back in the tray and his coat over the hook, and walks deliberately into the living room, where he sits down, retrieves his book, and stares at the same sentence for the next hour and a half.

Sally calls. He doesn't pick up, although in retrospect he should have. Could've used the distraction. She leaves a voicemail: _Beep._ "Hey Jeff. It's Sally. Don't mean to bother you, just wanted to check up . . . Mark seemed worried when he came back to the precinct without you. He said you'd seen something on the job that spooked you for some reason, made you run off first chance you got. And I know you're not the skittish kind, so . . . I dunno. Call if you're okay. Or text. Or something."  _Beep._

He picks up his cell and scrolls through until he finds Miles' contact. He used a baby picture for the contact photo, to Miles' intense chagrin. In it, Miles sits on the seat of a leather armchair that would dwarf even Jefferson, cross-legged and caught mid-laugh. A thatch of dark curls have just begun to sprout on his head. The photo is only slightly different from his home screen, which is a picture of Rio snuggled up with a book in that selfsame armchair, an infant Miles curled cozily in her lap.

When he looks up from the photo, it's dark outside.

Rio comes home around nine thirty. They eat at the kitchen table. Darkness presses up against the windows, and the bright overhead lights print reflections of the kitchen onto the glass. Jefferson keeps sneaking glances at it. He's there every time. At this time of day, he can't see anything beyond the window, which has been effectively turned into a one-way mirror by the interplay of light. 

Miles is out there somewhere, winging his way across the rooftops. Far from home. Far from school. Far from anyone who could help him, if he needed it. It drives Jefferson to distraction thinking about it, and by the time he gets around to actually picking at his food in the container it's grown cold. Jefferson half expects Spider-Man (Miles, it's Miles, he has to practice correcting himself) to drop down on the window sill, summoned by sheer force of thought.

He cracks open a fortune cookie and unravels the slip inside.

 _A good way to keep healthy is to eat more Chinese food. Lucky numbers:_ _41 36 12 1 11 35_

"You're quiet tonight," says Rio.

"Just thinking." He lifts his head, tries to be bright. "How was work?"

"Oh, it was interesting." She smiles. "There was a kid in the pediatrics unit who had knocked his front teeth out in some way or another. He couldn't tell us what had happened because he kept lisping, and of course he wasn't old enough to write, so we had to sit down and make him draw us pictures of what he wanted to say. Of course the mother didn't see what had happened, her back was turned for some reason or other. Fue ridículo."

"¿Terminó bien?"

"Por supuesto. Entonces, nos dijó que no los hizo daño a sus dientes en absoluto, sino que los perdió normalmente y no se necesita nada de nosotros. Pérdida de tiempo enorme."

"No me digas."

"Sí. La madre fue contentísima, creía que su hijo había estado peleando."

She keeps talking, then, moving on to a less benign case, and he listens to her speak. It's easier not to think about anything else when she's talking, easier to merely nod and eat his food and offer a sympathetic noise of approval or agreement when she pauses for one. The mundanity of it is comforting, even if only slightly.

"What about you?" she asks, once she's finished, and the burdens of her day have been more or less all hashed out. "How was your day?"

He thinks about telling her, then. She's silent as she waits for him to answer her, expectant, open, and it's very, very, tempting. He's never kept a secret from her. Or at least, nothing like this.

But to say it would be to make it real. To say it would be to admit that it isn't his own personal conspiracy theory, and to invite another person into his personal panic spiral for no good reason at all. He doesn't even know if he's right. (He does.) Rio doesn't deserve to worry unless he's certain. (He is.)

"Quiet," he says simply.

She cocks her head inquisitively and reaches for a fortune cookie. "A quiet day at the precinct," she says. "That'll be the first one in what, fourteen years?"

"Well. Relatively quiet."

"That sounds more like it," she agrees. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

He shakes his head.

"Nothing interesting, or nothing good?"

"Yes," he says.

She pauses. "Maybe you should talk about it, anyway," she says, and a crease appears in her brow. "You seem upset."

"I'm just tired."

"No, you're not." 

He purses his lips. Lifts a mouthful of rice up out of the carton, lets it trickle back down without eating it.

"You don't have to," she says, after a moment. Her fingers curl hesitantly around the fortune cookie, and then she splits it open with one crisp, silence-shattering  _crack._ "Um. Ha! 'The wise man is the one that makes you think that he is dumb.' Hard to believe that every male surgeon I've ever worked with is a wise man, but there you go."

He makes an honest attempt at a smile. Rio doesn't trust it for one second. She places the slip awkwardly to the side of her plate, and reaches across the table for his hand.

"Jeff?"

He can see the back of her head in the yawning dark windowpanes behind her, the arch of her neck, the curve of her spine. He can see his own face staring over her shoulder, impassive and stony, less exhausted than gaunt.

He stands. "I'm going to head to bed early," he says. "Sorry, Rio. I'm just out of it tonight, that's all. Honestly."

"Are you sure?"

"Por cierto, cariña." He bends and kisses her cheek. She turns to accept it, clasping his hand, but lets him go as he pulls away. "Hasta mañana, ¿vale?"

"Si tú lo dices." She sounds slightly lost as he turns his back, and calls after him, "Goodnight."

 

* * *

 

How certain is certain enough? How sure do you have to be, to ask about something like this?

More certain than he is now, it has to be.

Sometimes he imagines that no matter how much evidence he compiles, it'll never be enough. There'll always be some nagging doubt, probably born of wishful thinking, pushing him to investigate further, get one more piece of proof, verify one more time.

What does he do now? There isn't a guide, for things like this. There's no counsel, no book, no forum he can search for answers. Nobody tells you what to do if your child turns out to be a hero. Nobody prepares you for that kind of tragedy.

 

* * *

 

"Dad?"

Miles' voice is groggy, which indicates, to Jefferson's delight, that he was at some point recently sleeping, and not performing gymnastic feats. "Hey, Miles," he says, leaning against the bathroom door. He keeps his voice low. "How are you?"

"I'm — how _am_ I —  _how do you think I am?_ It's two in the morning!"

"I know," he says quickly, "I know, I know. Sorry. Did I wake you up?"

_"What do you think?"_

"Sorry," he repeats. "I just. Freak bit of dad paranoia, you know how it is."

"I actually don't," says Miles, which is fair. "Why are you calling? Is something wrong?" The sleep falls away from his voice.

He's kept the lights off in the bathroom so as not to wake Rio, which means he can see out the window. A tabby cat creeps down the fire escape, its paws treading lightly on the rail.

"No," he says, hesitating.

"You don't sound sure."

"Nothing's wrong here," he says, and that sounds better. "I just woke up with this irrational thought, that—"

Miles waits for one second, two, three.

"That what?" He's irritated, as he has every right to be. It's two o'clock, after all. And God, what is Jefferson doing, waking him up this late? He has class tomorrow. He should be getting his rest.

"That you weren't safe," he says. In the dark of the bathroom, it's easy to pretend that the conversation isn't really happening, and he's just speaking the words out into oblivion. That Miles can't really hear him. When he thinks about it like that, it's easier to say.

"Well, I am," Miles says after a moment.

"Are you?" He hadn't meant it to sound so contrary, but there it is.

It doesn't get an immediate answer. "I'm fine," Miles says delicately instead, and _that_ isn't helping, not at all. "I'm doing great, I'm doing well. I was doing better when I was sleeping, though, so unless there's something else—"

"Nothing else," Jefferson says. "Go back to sleep. I'm sorry to wake you."

"Are you sure? You all right?"

A stirring comes from the bedroom behind him. He holds very still until it passes.

"Fine," he murmurs.

"For real, though?"

The tabby cat turns, its green eyes wide and luminous in the dark. Then it leaps from the fire escape to some invisible landing out of view, and vanishes. Perhaps it fell. He doesn't know.

"Yes."

"Dad."

"Go back to sleep," he repeats. "Talk to you when you get home. Okay?"

As if Miles' promise is going to make him feel any better. As though a handful of words are going to help Jefferson believe that his son will make it home.

"Sure," Miles agrees. "See you later. Love you."

He hangs up before Jefferson can say it back. Jefferson very nearly calls him again, just to get the chance.

When he tiptoes back into the darkened bedroom, Rio's shape is curled over on her side of the bed. He settles his phone on the nightstand, wincing when the charger chirps as it's plugged in. The covers rustle as he draws them back and tries to settle his weight on the bed without disturbing her, moving with pained lethargy. The bedspring creaks. The sheets twist and tug as he maneuvers them back into place. Every odd noise seems deafening, every movement overt.

As he at last finds a comfortable position and comes to a rest, her side heaves in a long sigh. He freezes, thinking he's woken her, but then her breathing evens out again, and a measure of tension weeps out of his spine.

"I wish you'd tell me what's wrong," she murmurs.

He looks over, but she's still turned with her back to him, ribs rising and falling in rhythm. He waits, but she says nothing else. There's no indication that he hadn't imagined her speaking, or that she was ever awake in the first place.

It takes a while for him to fall asleep, after that. Which is fine by him. His dreams, when they come, are horrible things.

 

* * *

 

On Tuesday, Jefferson watches desperately from his living room television as Spider-Man is knocked out of the air by a punch Jefferson can feel through the screen, and flies for eighty feet before crashing into a building with a force that would've splintered a normal human's vertebrae into several hundred distinct pieces. He gets up from this almost immediately and suplexes the Green Goblin eight stories down into the ground, while Jefferson stands numb in front of the monitor with his stomach hovering somewhere around his feet and a scream trapped in his throat.

On Wednesday, he hears about Spider-Man stopping a robbery down in Midwood and can't stop himself from asking whether or not the perps were armed. It turns out that they were, and he gets so nauseous he has to go to the bathroom, where he clings to the sink and takes deep breaths for almost half an hour before he can return to the office. He tells the others that it was food poisoning, and they let him go home early. It's the worst of all possible decisions; he spends the rest of the day lying in bed feeling like he's going to be ill.

On Thursday, he goes into the precinct's records department and pulls every case report that's been written in the last few months about Spider-Man. The intern working there sends him a ringer of a nasty look as they emerge two hours later with a three-foot stack of files for his perusal, and he thanks them for their trouble. He spends the whole afternoon reading it through, forcing himself to brave even the grisliest fights. Especially the fights. He does this because knowing is going to make him feel more better than not, in the long run, but reading through the injury reports it sure doesn't feel like it. Nothing feels better, nowadays. It just feels varying degrees of worse.

While he's poring over these documents on the dining room table, Rio texts him that she's covering for one of her coworkers' graveyard shift. She pairs it with an apology and a note about leftovers in the fridge. Normally, this would be fine, except he doesn't think that he can make it through another fourteen hours alone in his house. He doesn't think he can make it through another fourteen minutes.

But where can he go? Not work. Not Visions. There's nowhere that could make any of this better, or possibly serve to distract him, because Spider-Man is everywhere. He's in every nook and cranny of Brooklyn, in every storefront, papered on billboards and street art and worn proudly on t-shirts. There is nowhere he can go that won't be Spider-Man. Nowhere that he can go that won't be  _Miles._

Except—

He sits up straight. Then he shoves back his chair and goes to get his keys.

 

* * *

 

May Parker answers the door surprisingly quickly, for a woman of her age. That precise age is hard to pin down. Although the hair that falls around her chin is grey, her back is ramrod straight, and she doesn't move with the slow timidness typical of the elderly. She’s taller than she looks on TV, and she has a keen, almost dangerous glint to her eyes that the cameras did nothing to convey. He doesn't remember her wearing a shotgun holster in the news, either.

When she sees who it is, her reaction is instantaneous.

"Come back with a warrant," she says, and shuts the door.

He hears the unforgiving clicks of what must be four or five different locks sliding into place, and he hurries to say, "Mrs. Parker, I'm Officer Jefferson Davis, with the PDNY."

"And I'm not interested."

"I'm not here on police business," he says.

A pause. She isn't unlocking the door, but she hasn't walked away from it yet, either. He takes his cap off.

"I'm here to talk about Miles," he says.

Silence hangs in the air for a moment. Then, one by one, the locks slide out of place, and she cracks open the door.

"You’re his father," she says grimly.

He nods.

"I’ve heard about you," she says. "I suppose I didn't realize when you said — Morales is his mother's name?"

He nods again.

"I see." She looks down. "I hope you’re not here to tell me something awful happened to him."

"Mrs. Parker," he says, frustrated, "if that were the case, I think you'd probably know before I did."

She winces, but doesn’t disagree.

"That's the problem."

She accepts this with a slight nod, and then opens the door fully, indicating that he should come in. He hesitates to step inside, lingering for a moment on the stoop.

"I want to be sure that we understand each other," he says. "You know that he's—"

"Do you drink tea, Officer Davis?"

The question takes him aback. She turns and walks away, leaving the door open behind her, and he hurries to follow her.  "I . . . can't say that I do, but if you're offering—"

"Good," she says. "We'll do this over whiskey, then."

 

* * *

 

He didn't exactly expect Jack Daniels, but when she cracks open a bottle of 64' Macallan single malt, he physically winces. That bottle could put Miles through a year of college, depending on where he goes.

May, unrepentant, takes out two fat crystal glasses from the freezer. "Neat, Officer?"

"I — sure." He was about to tell her that he doesn't drink whiskey, nor anything stronger than the occasional a glass of red, under most circumstances, but given the going price for the bottle she's holding he doesn't think he could manage it without sounding rude.

"Good man. Ice ruins a good single malt. I chill the glasses, anyway." She pauses, and holds one to the light. "If you don't trust a company enough to drink their liquor the way they bottled it, don't buy from them. That's what Ben said, anyway. Then again, he had a more discerning palette than most when it came to what he wrecked his liver with."

"Was your husband a big whiskey drinker?"

"Christ, no. Ben thought it tasted worse than piss." She pours ample amounts into both glasses and hands one over. The liquor is dark amber, glittering under the light, and carries a pungent, almost steely tang when he lifts it to his nose. "He wouldn't touch anything but Dom Perignon. And pinot. He loved a good Oregon pinot, when he could get one." The fond nostalgia in her voice is almost painless, he marvels. It's as though she has managed to completely sever her husband's memory from that of his death.

He doesn't ask why she has two whiskey glasses in her freezer if her husband didn't drink the stuff. It isn't his concern, and more importantly, he doesn't think she'd tell him that easily if it was really anything worth knowing. He just touches his lips to the rim of his glass, politely, while she takes a truly astonishing swig of her own.

"Let's go to the parlor," she says. 

She settles herself on a chaise lounge, and he sits uneasily in the armchair opposite her. The lamp at her side pours a warm, welcoming gold light into the room, which is decorated with a cozy sentimentality, peppered with picture frames and little porcelain knickknacks and antique furniture, just the way one would expect an aging aunt's parlor to look. The only object out of place here is May.

Oh, she's very good at appearing harmless, with her legs curled up underneath her demurely and her narrow shoulders hidden beneath a formless behemoth of a woolen sweater, but the charade doesn't suit her at all. She wears matronly widowhood like an ill-fitting uniform, one draped unceremoniously over her shoulders without her consent or approval, and it bleeds through in the subtle ways that she chafes against the archetype. May Parker is a hard woman, or at least she used to be. She doesn't sustain the facade of innocence in any way that matters, from the sharp line of her pursed lips to the hard glint of her pale blue eyes to the practiced way she swirls the whiskey in her hand. Anyone who cared to look could see that.

"I was sorry to hear about your nephew."

"Were you?" She tilts her head. "Most cops didn't like him."

"I disapproved of Spider-Man's methods. That didn't mean I wanted him dead."

"Mm." She makes a neutral sound, neither agreement nor disagreement. "A lot of people were sorry, once he was gone. All kinds. Even some of his enemies, people who I could've sworn spent years trying to kill him. It made me a bit cynical, I suppose." 

"The city mourned him, Mrs. Parker."

"Everybody loved Peter once he was in the ground," she says dismissively. "When all that anyone remembers is him being noble. That's easy. You know what's hard? Loving him when he's twenty six and alive and a whole entire idiot, that's what's hard."

"Mrs. Parker?"

"If he were here, he'd be agreeing with me. He knew he was an entire idiot, and that's why he needed me. Needed us, I should say. Me and his friends, odd bunch that they were. He kept people around that he knew would keep him in check, so when he ran up against the cliff's edge, he'd have someone with a hand on his collar, pulling him back." She traces the rim of her glass idly. "He should've had a sidekick. Sometimes I think those fancy syndicated superhero teams have the right idea, banding together. It's not economical, having members operate unanimously instead of working on multiple fronts, but it's safer. You've got a higher chance of somebody having your back."

"Would Peter have taken that kind of offer, if he received it?" He's genuinely curious. He never got to talk to Spider-Man about the motivations behind his methods, before, and this is about as close as he's ever going to get.

"He received loads," she says. "He didn't take them."

"He worked better alone?"

"No," she laughs, without once ounce of humor, "not really. He worked great in groups. He just didn't want anyone else getting hurt because of him."

She takes another sip. Solemnly, he takes one from his own glass. It tastes like it smells, which is to say awful, like liquid aluminum poured over concrete. He decides he tends to favor Ben Parker's opinion of whiskey, all things considered. "Did you ever discuss it with him?"

"There was not a single minute of a single day, after I found out Peter was Spider-Man, that I did not spend thinking about all the ways he could die." It's blunt, short. Less a confession than an informative fact. "And, to that extent, all the ways that I could prevent it. Yes, we talked about it. I argued my best. It never worked." She paused. "I don't think about the first one anymore. But funny enough, the second one still occurs to me every now and then."

Her eyes drop to her glass. What she's thinking about he can probably guess. He doesn't know what she's trying to get at, or if she's trying to get at anything at all.

It occurs to him that he may be the only person in the city she can talk about this with. At least with any hope of real understanding. It's hard to resent her for the circumlocution, after that.

"Spider-Man came back," she says. "My son didn't."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be," she tells him. "I'm glad. New York needs Spider-Man more than I need . . . well, anything, really, but far more than I need whatever sanctimonious self-pity I got to wallowing in while the city was mourning Peter. The name, the mask, is more important than Peter ever was."

"That's not fair to you."

"I figured it out a long time ago," she says. "My kid was a superhero. The universe doesn't tend to give two shits about what's fair to me." She raises her glass to him. "To us, rather."

Finally, she's come around to Miles, and it's so daunting a conversation that he'd almost rather she go back to talking about her dead son. He sets his glass on a coaster and edges it aside.

"When did you find out?"

"Three days ago," he says. Then, "A week ago. Maybe. I don't know."

"Hard to pin down, is it?"

"I'm still not sure I believe it," he admits, and she nods sagely.

"I can understand that," she says. "Well. I can sympathize. I caught Peter trying to sneak through the window in his suit, so I can't say our experiences are the same. But I have the feeling that'll be the case with a lot of this."

"I just . . . he _isn't,"_ he says. "Not really. He's my boy. He's not  _Spider-Man."_

"Of course he's not," she says softly. "To you. He's Spider-Man to everyone else. But to you—"

"He's just Miles."

"Or just Peter. Or just Gwen, I expect, to whoever she's got back home."

"But I know him," he insists, sitting up. "They don't know him. The city? It doesn't. It doesn't know Miles. _I_ know Miles. And he's not, he isn't—"

"Spider-Man? Yes," she counters, "he is. He chose it, and they made him so."

"What do they know about it?"

"The city?"

"Yes!"

"The city knows him," she says. "It may not know Miles. But it knows Spider-Man, and that's enough. It doesn't have to know your son to love him, just the same."

"The city doesn't have the right! The city never drove him to school, or made him lunches, or helped him with his homework—"

"It isn't about that, it's—"

"It's  _exactly_ about that! Because that's my son under there," he says, and it's the first time he's let himself say it, so it comes out reedy and uncertain, but still true and clear, "no matter who they think he is, and they don't get — they don't get to have him! They don't get to take him—"

"You haven't lost him."

"But I will," he blurts, and then the room is very quiet. She opens her mouth to reply, then shuts it. With a long pull from the glass, she finishes the last of her whiskey. He slides his across the coffee table, and she finishes that, too.

"Here's the thing," she says, and sets the glass down hard on the table. "Take it from someone who's done it twice: Yes. You will. And it'll hurt like a bitch."

"And I'm just supposed to — to let that happen?"

"No," she says, equivocal, "but you can't really stop it, either."

"So where does that leave me?"

May Parker stretches and stands, collecting their glasses. "The better question," she says, "is where that leaves Miles." She heads towards the kitchen, stops, and speaks over her shoulder: "Peter worked alone, and it's probably what killed him. When you put it like that, it doesn't really matter how noble his reasons were, does it?"

Jefferson rises. "I want you to ask Miles to stop," he says, finally giving voice to the reason he came.

She cocks her head, less affronted than he had expected her to be; only surprised. "Do you think that would work?"

"If he would take it from anyone—"

"It wouldn't be from me," she says oddly. "I can ask him if you want, Officer, but I'll tell you right now that it won't do any good."

"You were the person closest to Peter Parker. If you told Miles that it wasn't worth it . . ."

"But I don't believe that," she says plainly.

"I'm not asking you to  _believe_ it." He doesn't know how she doesn't understand, when he's being as clear as he can. "I'm asking you to save him before—"

"He ends up like Peter?" It's ugly, when she says it so frankly. Nonetheless, he gives a short nod.

May smiles thinly, and inclines her head with a knowing lilt. "Take it from someone who's thought about it for a long time," she says. "Telling Miles to stop isn't going to save him. Helping him, on the other hand—"

"I'm not going to help my son get himself killed."

"Is that what you think I did?"

He winces. She is, as ever, neutral, her words wielded like a clean scalpel. "Do you think that by helping Peter, I helped get him killed?"

"Of course not, Mrs. Parker."

"You can be honest, Officer. We're both adults here." 

"That's not what I meant."

"I was an enabler, then," she says simply. "I didn't help him, but I didn't stop him, is that it? Because I'm afraid you're not giving me enough credit. I was there with him almost every step of the way. Where do you think a grad student got the time to produce that much web fluid, hm? Or patent it? You think a high schooler knew enough about criminal law to keep the cops off his ass for ten years?"

"Mrs. Parker—"

"How about stitches?" She steps closer. "You know how many stitches I've put in over the course of the past decade? I don't. I lost count somewhere in the thousands. I also lost count of the set broken bones, excused absences, and forged doctor's notes. How do you explain an accelerated healing factor to life insurance? Do you think zoning permits for his Spider-Man headquarters materialized out of thin air?"

"Mrs. Parker."

"I researched," she says. "I investigated. I wrote. I picked him up the pieces of him every time someone broke him, and I patched him back together again as well as I could. Did I do a perfect job? No. But if there were cracks, well, no parent is perfect, and I never signed up for this in the first place. It wasn't my choice to be Spider-Man's mother, just like your parents never decided their kid was going to be a cop. But God help me, I did what I could. It wasn't—"

"Your fault," he finishes, with a sickly feeling. "Of course not."

The grandfather clock tolls ten times. As he always does, this time of night, he wonders where Miles is.

"Miles is Spider-Man," she says. It stings to hear out loud, a small prick in his side. "That isn't something you or I can ask him not to be, because Miles and Miles alone gets to decide who he is. You can't. You only ever get to decide who youare." 

The silence stretches taut and tense after that. Jefferson gathers his hat. She sees him preparing to leave, and walks him to the door.

As he steps out onto the porch, she hangs in the doorway. "I decided to be Peter's mother," she says. "And maybe that did help get him killed, who knows. But there it is."

"I'm sure did the best you could," he offers, uncertain of how to comfort her. Luckily, she waves it aside, rejecting the condolence.

"Of course I did," she says. "The point is: who knows? I couldn't have done anything else. The alternative didn't exist." An unhappy, nostalgic smile. "It's startling how simple life becomes, once you realize how much of it isn't up to you."

"I'm sorry about Peter," he repeats. It seems like the right thing to do.

Her mouth twists thoughtfully. "You should come back sometime," she remarks. "You were by far the most pleasant conversation I've ever had with a cop, and since we were talking about my dead son, that should tell you something."

"Excuse me?"

"I have tea at four on Sundays," she says. "Real tea, not whiskey. BYOB, and try to call before you come. I like to know how many to set the table for."

Jefferson, faintly bewildered, feels like he knows even less about May Parker than he did when he came in. "In case you ever need to talk to someone who understands," she adds, and he wrestles with himself for a moment before nodding ever so slightly.

He's halfway down the porch stairs when the door swings open again and she pokes her head out. "And tell Miles to come over more often," she says. "He's a sweet boy. Reminds me of Peter, when he wasn't being a jackass."

Before he can agree or decline, the door once more swings shut.

 

* * *

 

When he gets home, Jefferson lets the engine idle for a while at the curb while he sits there and listens to the police scanner. He waits for word of Spider-Man, any word, but it's a quiet night. There's no word of Miles on any channel.

From nowhere, a memory of Aaron surfaces. This isn't so uncommon, nowadays. He'll be doing nothing in particular and Aaron's voice will surface from some secluded corner of his consciousness, sweeping him into the past like the creeping tug of an undertow.

"You've got a dynamite kid," Aaron had said offhandedly. They were sitting on the couch at Aaron's place, waiting for Miles to gather his stuff after a sleepover at Aaron's. Miles must have been ten, eleven at the time. Jefferson could hear him shuffling around in the other room while he and Aaron waited in silence.

"Thank you," Jefferson had said politely.

"I'm serious. He's gonna be one of the greats, if he ever gets his act together and stops caring what everybody thinks."

Jefferson furrowed his brows. "Caring what people think," he repeated.

"Yeah. He's gotta get rid of this idea that the world's gonna end if he breaks a rule, or pisses someone off. It ain't matter. He's gonna be great, once he kicks the habit."

"Following the rules isn't a bad thing, Aaron."

"Following the rules just because they're the rules is a bad thing."

_"Aaron."_

"Jeff, I'm not looking to fight with you," Aaron said tiredly, lifting his hands. "It's not gonna go anywhere we haven't been before. Trust. I'm just saying—"

"What? What exactly are you saying?"

"If you try to drop the world all on him at once, he's gonna fall apart," he said. "You gotta let him discover it for himself, you know? In his own time. However he wants to do it. Sometimes, that means breaking the rules, experimenting. Figuring out what he wants."

Jefferson repressed a sigh. "You're not a parent," he said, "so I don't expect you to understand—"

"Hey, you can put that patronizing bullshit right back where it came from, man, I'm just trying to help."

"And how have your methods worked out in the past?"

"For me? Pretty well," Aaron shot back. "But thanks anyway, big guy. Glad to know you think so much of me."

"Miles isn't you."

"He sure isn't you, either," Aaron snorted, and Jefferson stiffened, feeling like he'd been struck. Aaron didn't seem to notice.

"He's more like me than you'd think."

"Ditto," Aaron said easily. "And if you keep trying to crush that boy into whatever shape you think is best for him, he's gonna end up a lot more like me than you want him to, I'll tell you that right now." 

Jefferson didn't dignify that with a response. They both stared ahead, silent.

"I'm sorry," Jefferson said after a moment. "I didn't mean to imply that it would be a bad thing, if—"

"You don't have to pretend," Aaron said curtly. "I'm not Miles. I know when you're lying."

Jefferson turned his head, keeping his face neutral. Aaron sighed sharply.

"Hey, you're his father. If you wanna lose him, that's your choice."

"I'm not going to lose him."

And here's where the memory ruptures, fragments, and dissolves, as Jefferson forgets how the rest of the scene went; whether they apologized to each other in that insincere, forcedly polite way they always did when Miles was around, or if they sat in silence until Miles appeared, and then he drove home in the same way. He doesn't know. He can't remember. But his mind supplies an alternate ending for him, anyway.

Suddenly, Aaron is wearing purple armor, his cowl down, but still in the same sprawled position he was before. There's a red stain on the front of his chest plate that's growing larger the more Jefferson stares at it.

Aaron turns his head and speaks, his voice low and hoarse. His eyes are dull. His face is bloodless. He's a corpse. "How would you know?" he asks. "That's how you lost me."

 

* * *

 

When Miles emerges from the school doors on Friday afternoon, he is hearty, healthy, and completely alive, if surprised by his father's impromptu and suffocating embrace.

"Uh, hi, Dad," he says. "I . . . missed you, too . . . ?"

The crowd of students splits and surges around them, moving like a river around a stone. It feels like they're the only two people in the world. Miles is inquisitive and waiting for an answer, both whole and wholly unhurt, perfectly fine, even if his shoes are untied. Jefferson wants to scold him for that. Jefferson wants to tell him everything, every subtle clue and giveaway, maybe just to hear him try to explain it away. Just to have an excuse, even if it's bad. Two words would do it. Two words would be enough. _I know._ That's all it would take.

"People are staring."

"I know," says Jefferson.

Miles rolls his eyes. "Okay, well, can we take it inside, at least? Cuz I still get teased about the whole 'I love you' thing, and I don't wanna guilt trip you, but I will _totally_ guilt trip you, so . . ."

"I get it, I get it."

He opens the trunk so Miles can toss in his suitcase. Brooklyn is sunny and cold as an ice bath in the Arctic, and their breath pours out in clouds that catch the light and turn to gold. It's a beautiful day, but a terrible one to be outside in. It'll only get colder when the night comes. Jefferson has a bizarre, hysterical thought about Spider-Man and winter coats, and barely resists the impulse to voice it.

"I feel like I haven't talked to you in a while," he says, pulling away from the curb. "Do you feel that way?"

"Not really," Miles says, bemused. "We talked on Monday. And I texted."

"But it's not the same, right? All this texting, and emailing, and Facebooking. There's still nothing like a good old-fashioned face to face conversation." He watches Miles settle himself in the rearview.

"Do I even need to say it?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm old. I get it."

He drives slowly, trying to prolong the conversation, or perhaps forestall the inevitable. "So," he says, "anything interesting at school?"

"Nope."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"Any news?"

"Nope," Miles repeats, popping the -p.

"Hm," Jefferson says neutrally. "Not at all? Nothing you want to tell me?"

He doesn't dare look behind him, but fixes his eyes on the road. Miles' hesitation is palpable.

"What's this about?" he asks, instead of answering.

"I don't know," Jefferson replies. "Why don't you tell me?"

He finally meets Miles' eyes in the rearview. Miles stares at him with a complex cocktail of wariness, eagerness, and fear.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says.

"Is that so."

"Yeah, I — listen, what's up? Did you hear something?"

Jefferson tightens his hands on the wheel. He draws a breath. Miles is watching as though the fate of the universe hinges on his next word.

"Sometimes," Jefferson finds himself saying, "people keep secrets from each other. For their own good. Or what they think is their own good. As a parent, I know that. I've done it. As a police officer, even, I've done it. Not everybody needs to know everything, all the time."

"Dad?" Miles says, guardedly.

"And that's fine. But sometimes, people keep secrets that aren't good for each other. Secrets that, while they think it's for the other's own good, are actually just going to drive a wedge between them, when really it would be better for everybody if the truth was just . . . out there. And it's not necessarily anybody's fault, because that person, the one who was keeping a secret, they were just trying to protect the other. But at the end of the day, we can't decide for other people what's best for them. And if not knowing that secret is going to make it harder for that other person to protect the first, I mean, to be a good friend, or family member, say — do you get where I'm going with this?"

"I don't think so."

Damn. He pulls to a halt at a red light. "As your father," he says carefully, "I'm always going to be in your corner. You know that."

"Yeah," Miles agrees.

"And . . . even if, sometimes, you decide to do things that I . . . that aren't safe, or aren't what I would do . . . I'm still your father. And that spark you have, however you want to use it — I'll help you. However you need. Whatever you need. I've only ever wanted you to succeed. That's all I want. So if you decide that you're going to do something . . . dangerous, or, uh . . . high-octane, as it were? That's . . . it's not _fine_ , I'm never going to say it's  _fine,_ but — it's your choice. And I can make peace with that, _if you let me help you."_ He stresses it as hard as he can, and Miles' cheek twitches.

"What are you talking about, Dad?"

"I solve mysteries for a living, Miles," Jefferson snaps, and Miles winces, biting his lip. "How long did you think — no. Never mind. That's not what this is about. I'm just . . . we both know, all right? We both know."

Miles says, quietly, "It's the most important thing I've ever done."

It's the worst possible thing he could have said. 

Jefferson hesitantly asks, "Does it . . . feel right, to you? When you're out there?"

Miles nods. "It feels like — yeah," he says, and he can't help the smile that leaks into his voice. "It's like when I'm painting, or sketching, or listening to good music, you know? It's not even that it feels good, necessarily. It's just right."

Jefferson stares at the road and comes to the quiet realization that he's never going to be able to talk Miles out of it. May was right.

"Okay," he says instead.

He turns around. He summons every ounce of courage he's ever had or pretended to have, every scrap of willpower he ever put into anything, and faces his teenage son. Miles, wide-eyed, sits up straight. "Then you do it," he says intently. "You do it, Miles, as well as you can, as long as you can. And you do it  _safely,_ and you do it  _carefully,_ but you do it, and don't let anyone ever tell you to stop."

Miles sniffs, and swallows hard.

"Some people spend their whole lives waiting for something that feels right. Some people never find it. But you found it, and you're good at it, so you do it, okay? You be that incredible, strong,  _brilliant_ superhero that you've always been. And when you need to step back, and just be Miles again for a minute, I'll be here."

Miles scrubs at his eyes. "Dad," he says, and his voice breaks.

A horn blares in front of them. Down the road, the traffic has pulled to a complete halt, which wouldn't be unusual, except not five seconds before it was moving at a brisk pace, and from Jefferson's vantage point he can see at least three of them turned on their side. His confusion is interrupted by an earsplitting roar, shortly accompanied by the sight of a hulking green giant monster hurling himself into the intersection. His impact cracks the asphalt beneath him. Jefferson thinks it's Goblin, for a second, but the ears are too pointed, the nose too long; what was the other green one, the beast? Jackdaw?

Jefferson is up and out of the car in a heartbeat, one hand on his walkie-talkie and the other on his gun. Only once he realizes Miles is following him does his freeze, turn, and watch as his son shuts the door behind him and faces him with an apologetically determined stare.

"Well," Miles says, haplessly, and gestures towards the intersection. "I, uh. Gotta clock in."

"Right." Jefferson is still rooted in place. "Right, this is . . . your arena."

Miles nods, rocks on his heels. Behind him, the Jackal vaults a car like a frisbee.

"Don't get too close to the teeth," Jefferson manages. "The other guy ran into trouble with them, once. The venom is paralytic."

"Oh. Gotcha. Thanks."

"And the claws, stay clear of them. They're not paralytic, they're just nasty business—"

Miles lunges forward and hugs him tightly around the waist. Jefferson wraps him up in his arms and squeezes, maybe a little too tightly, but Miles sure doesn't seem to mind. He buries his face in Jefferson's chest and lets himself be held.

"I'll be fine," he promises, pulling away. "Stay safe."

"That's bold, coming from—"

"Shh," Miles whispers, and puts a finger over his lips, grinning. Then he flits away, ducking between parked cars, and — quite literally — vanishes from sight. 

Jefferson takes a moment to compose himself, and then unclips his walkie-talkie.

"I need backup on East Broadway and Catherine, we have a ten ninety-nine, repeat: ten-ninety nine, I need all units focused on East Broadway and Catherine, over."

He drops the walkie-talkie and steps away from his car, holding up his hand. "I need everyone to back away from the crime scene! PDNY, we're gonna evacuate the square, and we need all civilians as far away from the green guy as possible — yes, that includes you, kid, put your phone away before you get yourself hurt — evacuation in progress, thank you! Back on up, that's it, let's go, away from the danger—"

Slowly, with a great deal of resentful muttering, the crowd starts to peel away from the blockade of stopped cars. Jefferson follows, herding them as best he can, while in the distance a trio of sirens springs up. A gasp of feedback from his walkie-talkie suggests that someone's heard him.

"That's right, folks, just move it on out . . . ma'am, if you could pick up the pace, I'd appreciate it; thank you, there you go . . ."

As he's talking, a car drops out of the sky and lands squarely where a cluster of civilians was standing right before, courtesy of the monster behind them. Jefferson blows out a breath of relief that he doesn't get the chance to finish, because abruptly one of the women in the crowd points behind him and screams. It's not so much a scream of horror as it is one of excitement, and it catches like wildfire; a roar goes up in the crowd. Jefferson spins on his heel.

Spider-Man swings out from behind a building, zipping through midair like a hummingbird, and deals the Jackal a kick squarely to the jaw. The  _CRACK!_ of the monster's jaw is audible from a few hundred meters down the street. The crowd shrieks with approval. There's a smattering of applause. Jefferson tenses as the Jackal's hand flies around to swat Miles out of the sky, but Miles is too fast, slipping between his fingers with a dextrous twist, looping a strand of webbing around his neck, and hauling himself around with his own momentum. Then he latches on to the edge of a building and jerks himself free as the Jackal stumbles, topples onto his knees, and is promptly delivered a swift punch to the neck.

Slowly, incrementally, Jefferson relaxes. He's still terrified. He still can't bring himself to move or look away, and doesn't think he'll be able to for a long time. But the more Miles works, the more it becomes clear that he's right — he's not just good at this. He's a natural. He moves in midair with the grace of something born there, and he fights with an elegance that turns it into an art. It's enough to make Jefferson stop wanting to cry out. It's enough to make him want to cheer. He wants to tell the world, somehow, that that's his son, that's his boy, Jefferson's boy. That's Miles Morales. That's Jefferson's son.

Spider-Man snags the top of a building and vaults across the sky, clearing the Jackal's attempted blow by a mile. At the apex of his arc, he's high enough that he passes over the sun, and for a moment he's suspended there, gold light billowing out from behind his silhouette, his back arched with the grace of a dancer, joy written into the bend of his outstretched arm as he casts another line of silk down to the ground below. He's untouchable. He's godlike. He's deathless, caught in midair like that, and it seems like the whole world has paused to stare at him in wonder.

Jefferson smiles.  _I know,_ he wants to tell it.  _Look at what he's becoming._

_Look at what he's become._

**Author's Note:**

> I know that as kids, Jefferson and Aaron had a place where they'd put up art in Brooklyn, but I started the fic with the idea of Jefferson originally being from Queens (mostly because I have family there and I love the place), and by the time I remembered that bit from the movie I'd grown too attached to the idea to change it. And hey, they always could've moved when they were teenagers.
> 
> Summary is quoting Edna, from the Incredibles II. Title is from the song by Queens of the Stone Age.


End file.
